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EvangelicalTheories of Biblical Inspiration
EvangelicalTheories of Biblical Inspiration
Biblical Inspiration
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Evangelical Theories of
Biblical Inspiration
A REVIEW AND PROPOSAL
24689753 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
To Philip Wayne Trembath, the past,
who began in me the process of faith seeking understanding,
and
To Mark Philip Trembath, the future,
in whom God's grace so happily resides.
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Acknowledgments
Introduction 3
Notes 119
Bibliography 143
Index 151
Evangelical Theories of
Biblical Inspiration
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Introduction
The past decade has seen an energetic resurgence of books and articles by
Protestants on the subject of biblical inspiration. For many prior decades the
topic lay dormant, a condition fostered by naivete and neglect from church
"conservatives" and outright dismissal from church "liberals." The current
renascence of interest in inspiration may thus be seen as a judgment by
both wings of the church upon their former ways of treating the subject, a
judgment which, like all honest reappraisals, carries with it the potential of
significant advances in theological understanding. As such, there is reason
enough to justify the effort.
There exists, though, another and perhaps more positive reason why
this subject deserves greater attention within the church. Father James T.
Burtchaell notes in his Catholic Theories of Biblical Inspiration since 1810
that "the controversy over biblical inspiration is an excellent test case whereby
to diagnose many of the ills that have weakened Catholic theology, especially
since the Reformation. The real issue here is what confounds scholars in so
many areas: the manner in which individual human events are jointly caused
by both God and man." He then goes on to suggest that "today the most
easily examined instance of divine-human responsibility is the Bible."'
This diagnosis and suggested therapy is one with which I heartily agree,
not just for Catholics but for Orthodox and Protestants as well. The topic
of inspiration gives theologians the opportunity to conjoin many discrete
fields of inquiry: theology proper (the doctrine of God), theological anthro-
pology (Christian reflection upon human beings), biblical exegesis (the sci-
ence of text criticism and hermeneutics), and ecclesiology (the doctrine of
the church). Inspiration thus calls for specialists in each of these fields to
expand their horizons to the others, for at this conjunction, as at few others,
nearsightedness guarantees superficiality.
3
4 Evangelical Theories of Biblical Inspiration
The critical significance of this third principle is that this book will not
survey those theologians whose ecclesiologies are deliberately exclusive or
sectarian in nature. Such ecclesiologies cannot adequately account for the
spectrum of alternative and legitimate forms of Christian belief and activity
present within the canonical Scriptures. I will instead consider those theolo-
gians whose works were directed toward, and accepted by, many Christian
communities. Likewise, I shall feel free to draw upon theologians from a
variety of backgrounds.
This book proceeds in the two stages implicit in its subtitle. The first two
chapters involve a review of representative inspiration theories. Chapter 1
surveys deductivist theories. I will further define deductivism below, but
it may be stated in general that such theories begin with the element of
the divine in biblical inspiration rather than the human. Chapter 2 takes
up inductivist theories, which generally attempt to balance the divine and
human agencies in the inspiration of the Bible. For this reason, they have
greater potential for accounting for the "joint causation" of the Bible referred
to above. In particular, the inductivist approach calls attention to the fact
that analysis of the concept of inspiration best begins by inspecting those
communities which claim to be inspired; only then does it work "backwards"
to consider the initiator and the means of inspiration.
The second part of the book is my proposal for how biblical inspiration
ought to be understood. Chapters 3 through 5 consider the recipients of
inspiration (human beings), the medium of inspiration (the Bible), and the
initiator of inspiration (God). Here we shall discover that the traditional
evangelical understanding of anthropology leads to the conclusion that people
cannot learn about God except by learning from God. From this we can see
that a particular means of learning about God need not possess extraordinary,
miraculous, or "divine" characteristics in order to be a vehicle for knowledge
of God. Rather, the initial critical question to ask is whether that means of
learning is consonant with salvation as experienced and understood by the
Christian community. I shall thus propose that "the inspiration of the Bible"
should be taken to refer not to empirical characteristics of the Bible itself but
rather to the fact that the church confesses the Bible as God's primary means
of inspiring salvation within itself. Finally, I shall suggest that the doctrine
of God which best coordinates with inspiration understood in this way is that
offered by Karl Rahner and other so-called transcendentalists.
A final note: The verse that has traditionally been interpreted as the Bible's
only reference to itself as "inspired" is 2 Timothy 3:16: "All Scripture is
theopneustos . . . ," or, "All theopneustos Scripture. . . ." Most treatises on
biblical inspiration, especially those from the more conservative wings of the
6 Evangelical Theories of Biblical Inspiration
way to describe my purpose in this book is to discuss how it is that the Bible
becomes Scripture for the believing community, that is, how a particular
collection of books serves as the ultimate means through which God awakens
salvation within the community that is then called the church. That is why I
have written about biblical, rather than scriptural, inspiration; I wished from
the outset to emphasize that the presence (or absence) of salvation is utterly
crucial in discussing the meaning of inspiration. The book called the Bible is
read very differently by nonbelievers and believers, and whatever accounts
for this difference is central to the notion of inspiration. I trust that what
follows will prove to be a helpful contribution to the church's understanding
of itself as the community inspired to salvation by the Father of Jesus through
the Bible.
1
Deductivist Theories
of Biblical Inspiration
In this chapter I shall examine four theories of biblical inspiration. They are
related by a common method or approach, which may be called a deduc-
tivist approach. A deductivist approach is one that reflects the understanding
that knowledge is grounded upon beliefs which are not subject to empirical
verification but nevertheless guide or influence empirical observations. Such
beliefs are often uncritically held; persons holding them assume them without
examining them. In addition, and probably because they are never critically
inspected, these beliefs are taken to be inviolable. They therefore shape and
influence major portions of mental and empirical activity but remain imper-
vious to influence themselves. Since such beliefs logically antedate all mental
and empirical activity according to this approach, it is also referred to as an
a priori scheme of knowledge. I shall use these two terms interchangeably.
In general, deductivist approaches to biblical inspiration begin by dis-
cussing and formulating a doctrine of God. Since a part of any doctrine of
God is that God cannot lie or deceive, anything said to be "the word of God"
must (ex hypothesi) be the truth. The Bible has been called the word of God,
and thus it too has been taken to be "the truth." A deductivist theory of
biblical inspiration must explain how the books of the Bible, which at least
appear to be like many other books, can be called the word of God in such a
way that their complete truthfulness is ensured. The genius of a deductivist
approach to inspiration lies in its confession of the cause-and-effect relation-
ship between the character of God and the truthfulness of the Bible. This is
what William Abraham means when he says, "A deductive type of theory
begins with a basic theological claim about the meaning of inspiration and
attempts to deduce from this what Scripture must be or contain." 1 The a
priori element in this approach is the content of both the doctrine of God and
the doctrine of inspiration, which is determined independent of any human
8
Deductivist Theories of Biblical Inspiration 9
or were they drawn instead from what the church believed about the Bible?
With respect to both pairs of questions, my contention will be that these
evangelicals asserted the former but practiced the latter.
I am not unsympathetic to the concern of the authors to articulate a
defensible theory of biblical inspiration. Indeed, at all times my criticisms are
offered with the intention of articulating just such a theory. For this reason,
I hope that the reader whose own understanding of inspiration is represented
here may feel challenged "from within" and thus feel the need, or at least
the curiosity, to consider the theory of biblical inspiration which this book
proposes.
Charles Hodge
"In every science there are two factors: facts and ideas; or, facts and the
mind." Thus begins the three-volume Systematic Theology of Charles Hodge
(1797-1878), a man recognized within Reformed Protestantism as "one of the
greatest Reformed theologians."2 All scientific activity operates, he explains,
by collecting raw or given data and relating them so that their "harmony
and consistency" are demonstrated.3 Genuine scientific activity is more than
simple observation of the given. It is also the deliberate arrangement of the
given so that their internal relations ("laws of nature") may be exhibited and
ascertained. Only in this way may the goal of science—greater knowledge
of the past and predictive ability over the future—be achieved.
Theology is also a science and thus operates inductively as do the natural
sciences. Its method is likewise to argue from effect to cause, to "begin with
collecting well-established facts, and from them infer the general laws which
determine their occurrence."4 The theologian resembles the natural scientist
in at least three ways. First, the assumptions they make are similar. Both
must assume the trustworthiness of sense perceptions, of cognitive reliability,
and of those truths which are not themselves facts but are implicit in the
recognition and acquisition of facts (e.g., cause and effect). Second, both
must respect the objectivity of the data with which they work. Facts must be
neither manufactured nor modified. Third, both deduce operative laws from
their observational activity. Some account must be made of the pattern and
regularity observed by careful and consistent attention to the data. As over
against Kant, Hodge insists that these laws "are not derived from the mind,
and attributed to external objects, but [are rather] derived or deduced from
the objects and impressed upon the mind."5
For the natural scientist, nature is the locus of the facts to be interrelated
inductively. For the theologian, that locus is the Bible. The Bible is the
storehouse in which are situated "all the facts which God has revealed
concerning Himself and our relation to Him."6 Scripture is not only the
Deductivist Theories of Biblical Inspiration 11
rather than "rendering men holy"), and the effect (inspiration in itself has
no sanctifying influence). The primary "object or design of inspiration is
to secure infallibility in teaching."17 It thus has to do not with the content
of knowledge communicated but rather with the certainty of transferring
that knowledge from primary author to written text. The significance of this
(traditional) distinction between revelation and inspiration is that the origins
of a particular text are irrelevant with respect to the doctrine of inspiration.
"If the sacred writers have sufficient sources of knowledge in themselves, or
in those about them, there is no need to assume any direct revelation. . . . No
more causes are to be assumed for any effect than are necessary."18
Hodge substantiates this conception of inspiration from both inside and
outside the Scriptures. From inside the Scriptures, Hodge cites the figure of
the prophet. Because
the law was written by Moses, and as Moses was the greatest of the prophets,
it follows that all the Old Testament was written by prophets. If, therefore, we
can determine the Scriptural idea of a prophet, we shall thereby determine the
character of their writings and the authority due to them.
A prophet speaks for another in such a way that the words and message
belong to the other and not to the prophet. Moses' ordination is here cited
as warrant both for his own and for Aaron's prophetic status (Ex. 4:14-16).
The signs of prophecy par excellence, therefore, are the divine formulae
"Behold, I have put my words in thy mouth" and "Thus saith the Lord."
Peter's assertion in 2 Peter 1:20-21 confirms this with respect to the Old
Testament and establishes it with respect to the New.20
Hodge also cites extrabiblical sources in justification of his definition.
Lexical analyses of the words theophoroi, entheos, and pneumatophoros
indicate to him that "All nations have entertained the belief that not only has
God access to the human mind and can control its operations, but that He
at times did take such possession of particular persons as to make them the
organs of his communications."21 The convergence of sacred and profane
conceptions of inspiration confirms that in antiquity "inspiration" had a fixed
meaning identical with the phenomenon of the Israelite prophet: a primary
speaker uses a secondary agent to convey a message to an audience, with
inspiration guaranteeing that what the agent conveys is what the speaker
intended.
Although at first glance it might appear that inspiration attaches to the
person of the agent, Hodge is careful to specify the message itself as that
which is protected by the speaker's (God's) infallibility. Indeed, the agent's
character is all but irrelevant in the process of inspiration. Hodge is careful
to deny, however, that it is rendered irrelevant by being overruled by
divine dictation.22 "The sacred writers were not made unconscious or irra-
14 Evangelical Theories of Biblical Inspiration
tional . . . [They] were not machines." Rather, they "impressed their pecu-
liarities on their several productions as plainly as though they were the sub-
jects of no extraordinary influence."
Hodge uses the analogy of the sanctifying activity of the Holy Spirit in
the life of the believer to illustrate this point: "There is no reason to believe
that the operation of the Spirit in inspiration revealed itself any more in
the consciousness of the sacred writers, than His operations in sanctification
reveal themselves in the consciousness of the Christian." Other evangelical
writers use the categories of superintendence and providence to account for
that which Hodge simply asserts, namely, that God's use of an agent in
the process of inspiration need not result in the diminution of that agent's
freedom or alteration of that agent's character.
A problem with Hodge's treatment is his subsequent assertion that apart
from inspiration, "a mere human report or record of a divine revelation
must of necessity be not only fallible, but more or less erroneous."23 The
errorlessness of the biblical message thus cannot simply be a conjoined effort
of God and person, as is the case with sanctification, for errorlessness is not
a constituent of sanctification as it is of inspiration. 24 The analogy between
inspiration and sanctification fails at the crucial point of accounting for
discernible infallibility in such a way that human freedom to err is not actually
overruled by divine activity. That freedom must in fact be overruled if the
effect of inspiration, unlike that of sanctification, is discernible errorlessness.
Hodge's inconsistency here could have been resolved by recourse to alter-
natives which he does not take. The alternative that humans can write faith-
fully and truly about God apart from immediate intervention is denied by
Hodge's understanding of the entailment of original sin, that is, "the inabil-
ity of fallen man in his natural state, of himself to do anything spiritually
good."25 The alternative that humans might truly learn of God by means of
a fallible mediator seems not to have occurred to him within the context of
the doctrine of Scripture. Any concrete evidence of human contribution to
the writing of Scripture is relegated to matters of literary style which no two
authors shared, and not to matters of human moral fallibility which they all
shared.
For Hodge, if perhaps not for others, the more important question concerns
the extent of those writings in which inspiration is operative. Thus, he speaks
of plenary inspiration, a multifaceted concept meaning variously (1) that all
books of Scripture are inspired and infallible, (2) that all the contents of
each book are equally inspired, and (3) that whatever a book "asserts" or
"teaches" is free from error because "Scripture cannot be broken" and "God
cannot deceive." Partial inspiration, therefore, which is the restriction of
inspiration to any but not all of these elements, is denied as not being "the
Church doctrine on this subject." 26 This is not to deny varying degrees of
Deductivist Theories of Biblical Inspiration 15
by a sacred writer and a fact being taught by a sacred writer. Since the intent
of inspiration has to do with the teachings of Scripture and not the opinions
which its authors held in common with their contemporaries, though, a critic
would have to show that a factual error was being taught in order to sustain
the allegation of this type of error in the Bible.
This apologetic may look like sleight of hand. It is certainly a device
whose usefulness is negligible because of its inaccessibility; after all, the
only persons who could conclusively adjudicate the difference between opin-
ion and teaching are the authors themselves, and we have no independent
access to their intentions. Hodge may easily be criticized, but, as before, a
more sympathetic reading is possible, and this time Hodge supplies his own
example.
"Science has in many things taught the Church how to understand the
Scriptures." A case in point is the interpretation of Genesis 1 with respect
to various states of cosmological knowledge. When Ptolemaic theory best
explained cosmological observations, the Bible was read in that light. When
Ptolemy was overthrown by Copernicus, the interpretation of Genesis fol-
lowed suit. Tellingly, Hodge speculates that "if geologists finally prove that
[the earth] has existed for myriads of ages, it will be found that the first
chapter of Genesis is in full accord with the facts, and that the last results of
science are embodied on the first page of the Bible." This is a remarkable
assertion from one who on the same page wrote that "theories are of men
[but] facts are of God." The point of interest here is the latitude that Hodge
gives to the human intellect in coming to decisions over matters of interpre-
tation, theology, and anthropology. This is no "biblicist" speaking; where
there is doubt regarding whether a biblical assertion is fact or opinion, let
the human community ("science") decide: "It may cost the Church a severe
struggle to give up one interpretation and adopt another, as it did in the
seventeenth century, but no real evil need be apprehended."
Finally, a brief word must be said about Hodge's understanding of the theo-
logical significance of the "autographs," the documents physically inscribed
or dictated by the biblical authors. His Systematic Theology does not address
this issue as such; it is not clear whether Hodge refers to the autographs
or to the earliest extant manuscripts when he speaks of the inspiration and
inerrancy of "the books of Scripture." What is somewhat clearer is that the
"discrepancies and difficulties" of even these manuscripts called for further
theological analysis than he had been able to give in this work. In 1877, in a
letter to Marcus Dods of the Glasgow Presbytery, he writes: "It is of the Bible
as it came from the hands of the sacred writers . . . that this infallibility is
asserted. . . . There may be errors between one part of Scripture and another,
arising from errors of transcribers."30
The significance of this statement is the evidence it gives of Hodge's belief
18 Evangelical Theories of Biblical Inspiration
that the authority of the Bible rests primarily upon external evidence (i.e.,
the inerrancy of texts) whose validity was "scientific," that is, independent
of the faith perspective of the reader or the community of faith in which that
reader lived. The Westminster Confession, to which all Princeton pastors
and teachers subscribed, located that authority differently: ". . . our full
persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth, and divine authority thereof,
is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit, bearing witness by and with
the Word in our hearts."31 The "heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of
the doctrine, the majesty of the style, [and] the consent of all the parts" all
give evidence to the Bible's being the Word of God.32 In the final analysis,
however, it is not these but the divine operation of the Holy Spirit in the
mind and heart of the believer that ultimately brings about the recognition of
the authority of the Bible. Both alternatives agree that the Scriptures come
from God, but Hodge's warrant for the believer's recognition of that divine
provenance signals the presence of another apologetic. No longer is the divine
status of the Bible a matter simply for Christians to affirm and, at times,
to debate. Now, because of the objective inerrancy of the autographs, it is
a matter to which in principle all persons ought consent.33 Hodge himself
does not explicitly draw this latter conclusion, but his inductive methodology
leads to it inescapably. His successors, especially Benjamin B. Warfield,
developed the possibility of the complete external verifiability of the divine
authority of the Bible.34
Hodge claimed that his understanding of biblical inspiration was simply
that which was always believed and taught by the church. Speaking of the
editorial stance of the Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review, a journal
which he founded in 1825 and edited for nearly fifty years, he writes, "No
article opposed to [the system of doctrine taught in the Bible] has ever
appeared in its pages. . . . It is believed to be true that an original idea
in theology is not to be found in [its] pages."35 This was a naive view.
The rising use of higher criticism in Europe and subsequently in the United
States demanded an apologetic for conservative Protestantism that had never
previously been required.36 Hodge's conceptual framework for mounting this
new defense was Scottish realism, or Scottish commonsense philosophy.
While it is not within the purpose of this book to explicate Scottish realism,37
its fundamental outline has already been noted. But Hodge failed to notice
how far his uncritical acceptance of commonsense philosophy deviated from
the traditional Augustinian and Calvinist concepts of the totality of the effects
of original sin. He specifically rejects, for example, speculative methodology
in theology as insufficiently empirical38 and mystical39 methodology as too
responsive to emotions or feeling.40 Even though he warns his reader here that
"conscience is much less liable to err than reason," he does not himself heed
this warning with regard to the certainty of knowledge derived by the mind
Deductivist Theories of Biblical Inspiration 19
from the senses and from "mental operations." Why should it be thought
that these cognitive activities escape the constrictions of original sin, which
Calvin had used theologically to relate all human faculties to God? Hodge
never answers this question, almost certainly because he did not see it
as one.
A second contribution made by Scottish realism to Hodge's theology
affects his understanding of the inspiration of the Bible more directly. Hodge
followed Thomas Reid41 in understanding words in a way similar to what
would later be called the picture theory of language. Words are directly
knowable by the mind and, in addition, are direct representations of the
objects to which they refer. Logically, therefore, words and sense impres-
sions are identical in that each refers directly to objects. Those objects, in
turn, are directly and with utmost certainty known by the mind. "Language
is the express image and picture of human thoughts; and from the picture
we may draw some certain conclusions concerning the original. . . . Now,
what is common in the structure of languages, indicates an [sic] uniformity
of opinion in those things upon which that structure is grounded."42 The
immediacy of word and object supported by this analysis of language war-
ranted Hodge's certainty that the words of Scripture convey infallibly to the
contemporary reader what God had put into the minds of the biblical author.
As Rogers and McKim note, "To read the biblical words was to encounter
the biblical thought or deed just as if [the reader] had had direct experience
of it."43 From this perspective, it is nearly impossible to overestimate the
literalness with which Hodge took the phrase "The Bible is God's Word."
Inspiration as a transmissive concept thus has a double sense. On the
one hand, it refers to the process by which the biblical author wrote what
God intended to be written. On the other, it refers to the immediacy of the
modern reader's access to those divine intentions and the certainty with which
the reader could know the mind of God. Small wonder, then, that Hodge
spent so little time directly considering higher criticism and the autographs.
What was the need, when "the Church doctrine" of inspiration accounted so
adequately for both the divinely authorized status of the biblical words and
for the immediate encounter of the modern reader with their divine meaning?
We have come full circle in this analysis of Hodge's understanding of
biblical inspiration, but we have not ended where we began. Hodge's treatise
oscillates between a view of the Bible as a storehouse of facts whose objective
truth is guaranteed by divine auctoritas and a view of it as a locus of
uninterpreted data standing in need of the contribution of human theory,
not divinely given, so that human understanding may result. He thus also
oscillates between viewing inspiration as a cognitive element attaching to
persons and as constituting a mere process guaranteeing an intact transmission
of the divine message independent of the cultural consciousness of persons.
20 Evangelical Theories of Biblical Inspiration
the most fundamental of Christian doctrines, nor even the first thing we prove
about the Scriptures. It is the last and crowning fact as to the Scriptures. These
we first prove authentic, historically credible, generally trustworthy, before we
51
prove them inspired.
at the same time the words of God, and thus, in every case and all alike,
absolutely infallible.58
Attention must be given to what Warfield means by the domination of the
biblical author by God in the process of inspiration. Warfield's usual words
used in describing this phenomenon are "superintendence" and "concursus."
He describes superintendence here, as noted earlier, primarily in terms of its
effects rather than its means:
[This] conception of co-authorship implies that the Spirit's superintendence
extends to the choice of words by the human authors (verbal inspiration),
and preserves its product from everything inconsistent with a divine author-
ship—thus securing, among other things, that entire truthfulness which is
everywhere presupposed in and asserted for Scripture by the Biblical writ-
ers (inerrancy). . . [This] has always been the core of the Church doctrine of
inspiration. 59
The term used here [pheromenoi] is a very specific one. It is not to be confounded
with guiding, or directing, or controlling, or even leading in the full sense of that
word. It goes beyond all such terms, in assigning the effect produced specifically
to the active agent. What is "borne" is taken up by the "bearer," and conveyed
by the "bearer's" power, not its own, to the "bearer's" goal, not its own. The
men who spoke from God are here declared, therefore, to have been taken up
by the Holy Spirit and brought by His power to the goal of His choosing. The
things which they spoke under this operation of the Spirit were therefore His
things, not theirs.66
This article, written toward the end of Warfield's life (1915), denied all
human contributions to the actual content of Scripture except for those of style
and personality.67 "There is, therefore, . . . not, indeed, a human element
or ingredient in Scripture, and much less human divisions or sections of
Scripture, but a human side or aspect to Scripture. . . . Scripture is the product
of man, but only of man speaking from God and under such a control of the
Holy Spirit as that in their speaking they are 'borne' by Him."68 Warfield's
concursus is in fact very one-sided. At no place in his exegetical analysis
is any consideration given to a genuine, unambiguously human contribution
or initiative. It is to be wondered why a bifocal concept like concursus was
chosen in the first place.
The reader's puzzlement does not abate when Warfield turns to a more
systematic treatment of "concursive inspiration."69 His most deliberate anal-
ysis of the various articles within The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible
attempts to account for what may be called the psychology of the inspired
writers. Warfield first recounts how God prepares those whom He will move
to write in ways that are "physical, intellectual, [and] spiritual," a prepara-
tion which "must have had its beginning in their remote ancestors." This
is the "providential preparation" that is the standard Reformed manner of
treating the manifestation of God's sovereignty in the ordinary operation
of the world; it is through means and is therefore nonmiraculous and in
fact nonextraordinary.70 But clearly providence alone cannot account for the
extraordinary quality of the Scriptures, encountered in but not limited to the
authority which they exercise in the church. What does explain their unique
characteristics is the additamentum that is technically called "inspiration."
This is an immediate action of God upon the biblical writer "which takes
effect at the very point of the writing of Scripture . . . with the effect of giv-
ing to the resultant Scripture a specifically supernatural character."71 This
is, in effect, what the reader wanted: a clear statement of the miraculous
origin of the Bible, purged of all human elements, which are simply over-
24 Evangelical Theories of Biblical Inspiration
As both Sandeen and Parsons note, however, "Warfield never actually uses
such an argument to provide authentication for a [biblical] statement."86
In the end, then, Warfield's deductivism was even more pronounced
than that of his mentor. His first detailed doctrine concerning the legitimate
parameters of inspiration theory never changed:
With these presumptions and in this spirit let it (1) be proved that each alleged
discrepant statement certainly occurred in the original autograph of the sacred
book in which it is said to be found. (2) Let it be proved that the interpretation
which occasions the apparent discrepancy is the one which the passage was
evidently intended to bear. It is not sufficient to show a difficulty, which may
spring out of our defective knowledge of the circumstances. The true meaning
must be definitely and certainly ascertained, and then shown to be irreconcilable
with other known truth. (3) Let it be proved that the true sense of some part of the
original autograph is directly and necessarily inconsistent with some certainly-
known fact of history or truth of science, or some other statement of Scripture
certainly ascertained and interpreted. We believe that it can be shown that this
has never yet been successfully done in the case of one single alleged instance
of error in the WORD OF GOD.87
The theological and exegetical restrictions placed upon the inductive task
completely guaranteed that no error could ever be charged against the Bible.
Only the third condition mentioned here is capable of being implemented
even in principle. The likelihood of its being used in fact is diminished
by its logical dependence upon the prior two conditions whose practical
demonstrability is nil in both cases.
Warfield's approach explains the normativity of Scripture by means of
a theory which, paradoxically, ends up denying the actual normativity of
Scripture. Both Hodge and Warfield testify to the "volumes" of discrepan-
cies and errors alleged against the Bible, but neither confronts any serious
discrepancy at the exegetical level.88 Thus, exegesis is completely dominated
by systematic considerations. In a startlingly clear affirmation of this domi-
nation, Warfield asks, "The issue is not, what does the Bible teach? but,
Is what the Bible teaches true?"89 A year earlier, writing more expansively
upon the same subject, he contrasted "two ways of approaching the study
of the inspiration of the Bible." The first operates by comparing the "facts
[of] the Bible as ascertained by Biblical criticism and exegesis" against "the
doctrine of inspiration taught by the Bible as applicable to itself." Warfield's
explanation of the second way will be cited at length:
The other method proceeds by seeking the doctrine of inspiration in the first
instance through a comprehensive induction from the facts as to the structure and
contents of the Bible, as ascertained by critical and exegetical processes, treating
all these facts as co-factors of the same rank for the induction. If in this process
Deductivist Theories of Biblical Inspiration 27
the facts of structure and the facts embedded in the record of Scripture . . . alone
are considered, it would be difficult to arrive at a precise doctrine of inspiration,
at the best: though, as we have already pointed out, a degree and kind of
accuracy might be vindicated for the Scriptures which might lead us to suspect
and to formulate as the best account of it, some divine assistance to the writers'
memory, mental processes and expression. If the Biblical facts and teaching are
taken as co-factors in the induction, the procedure . . . is liable to the danger of
modifying the teaching by the facts without clear recognition of what is being
done; the result of which would be the loss from observation of one main fact
of errancy, viz., the inaccuracy of the teaching of the Scriptures as to their own
inspiration. This would vitiate the whole result. . . .90
It will be noted that this is the approach which more closely approximates
the inductive method.
In rejecting inductivism as the preferred approach because of its tendency to
equate "facts with teaching" and thus risk allowing the facts to overwhelm91
the teaching, Warfield commits a grave mistake. In principle he allows one
divinely instantiated miracle ("a biblical teaching") to take precedence over
other divinely instantiated miracles ("biblical facts"). By so doing, he sets
one part of God's Word over other parts, which itself is a contradiction of
the doctrine of plenary inspiration. But more importantly, judgment concern-
ing the greater and lesser significance of various parts of the Bible is itself
an entirely human and therefore extrabiblical operation. Surely the Bible
nowhere authorizes its own compartmentalization into areas of wider and
narrower significance. If such a compartmentalization has in fact occurred,
then noninspired fallible humans must be responsible. If this is the result, then
the entire apologetic mechanism of difficulties, inerrancy, and autographa
freezes, for this mechanism has no purpose other than to insulate the original
purity of the Scriptures against the encroachments of self-serving humans.
Warfield's use of Scripture subordinates exegesis to prior, and therefore "ex-
ternal," considerations. But this is precisely the charge he had leveled against
his opponents. It is not entirely unexpected, then, to observe increasing resis-
tance among evangelicals to the use of this mechanism as they grew more
familiar with its implications.92
'insight into the human situation destroys every theology which makes expe-
rience an independent source instead of a dependent medium of systematic
theology.'"114
All three candidates are rejected for the same reason: "all multiple-source
views of the subject matter of theology are . . . unstable."115 Ultimately, if
not sooner, conflict arises between the dual sources, for example, between
the church and the Bible in Roman Catholicism or between experience and
the Bible in liberal Protestantism. Where such conflict arises, however, the
criterion or standard chosen to resolve it itself becomes the final source.
"Multiple source approaches to the subject matter of theology thus logically —
whether one likes it or not—reduce to single source interpretations."116 "Thus
we arrive at the Bible—the source by which Reason, Church and Religious
Experience can and must be evaluated theologically. We reach this point not
simply by process of elimination, but more especially because only Scripture
can be validated as a genuine source of theological truth."117
The claim here is that Scripture is norma normans non normata; the Bible
alone is ultimately normative in matters of reason, practice, and experience.
We shall now examine Montgomery's claims concerning Scripture by reflect-
ing upon the analogy between scientific and theological activity.
The first point to notice is that there is no relevant analogy at all between
the givenness of natural data in science and the givenness of Scriptural data
in theology. Wittgenstein's net analogy emphasizes that it is not obvious how
to understand and conceive of the natural world and that various alternatives
(hypotheses and ultimately theories) suggest competing ways of conceptual-
izing it until such time as the criteria of fit, predictability, and experimen-
tation are able to judge among better and worse theories. The data of the
natural world are therefore "objective" only in the sense that they constitute
the foundation to which observation statements, hypotheses, and theories
must be faithful, 118 and not in the sense that they are easily and objectively
understood. The infrastructure of observation statements, hypotheses, and
theories is constructed with the aid of the imagination, not in order to cre-
ate the world of facts but to create the world of understandable or conceiv-
able facts. The net analogy does not presume that there are no facts until
nets create them. Rather, it reflects the scientific community's (temporary)
uncertainty over how best to conceive of the structure and relations of those
facts.
Such, however, is not at all the status of biblical facts in Montgomery's
scheme. As we have just seen, Montgomery believes that the Bible is the
"single source" from which theologians obtain their data. But in spite of
his insistence that "What Nature is to the scientific theorizer, the Bible
is to the theologian,"119 biblical facts are significantly different from their
natural counterparts. For one thing, Montgomery sees the Bible as "self-
32 Evangelical Theories of Biblical Inspiration
interpreting"; it provides not only facts and data but also the "norms" by
which to understand and interpret them.120 In other words, the Bible, rightly
read, provides the theories by which all religious data are to be understood.
But where is the relevant analogy in science? The storehouse of objective
data in the natural realm does not include hypotheses and theories; these
are the contributions of human imagination, which work to organize those
data into conceivable groupings so that the mind can comprehend them.
In theology, however, we have seen that Montgomery explicitly rejects the
contribution of human imagination as being a "second source" in competition
with the source of scriptural revelation. The science of theology is thus seen
to be entirely reproductive or repetitive. Theologians simply recapitulate the
given data by means of norms and principles which are not only elements
within the given but are understood as such by the mind of the theologian.
Fterhaps this is actually what Montgomery intends to say, but if so, why
bother with the lengthy and irrelevant analogy from science?
A second puzzling question occurs to the reader while reflecting on Mont-
gomery's use of the naturalistic fallacy. To recall the point: Montgomery
had charged those who wished to see religious experience as a legitimate
source of theological data with committing that logical fallacy because they
confused description with prescription, "isness" with "oughtness." "How is
one to know that the divine and not the demonic is operating in the given
experience?"121 He responds with the point noted earlier, that some indepen-
dent or objective check is needed, "a source of theological data outside of
[religious experience], by which to judge it."122 He finds this check in the
Bible. But how does he know that he has found it there? Most theologians
answer this question by referring in various ways to the "faith" of the Chris-
tian person, but Montgomery does not. Instead, he turns to the discussion
of the objective, historical credibility of the Bible as that which ultimately
validates the certainty of Christian knowledge.
In his book The Shape of the Past: An Introduction to Philosophical
Historiography^ Montgomery lists those elements of the "empirical method
as applied to history [by which] one can inductively validate the Christian
revelation claim and the biblical view of total history":124
The point of interest here for our purposes is not so much whether Mont-
gomery is historically justified in making statements such as 1 above, whether
statement 2 is merely a variant of John Hick's discredited "eschatological
verification" scheme,125 whether any dispassionate reading of Paul and the
Gospels could lead to statement 3,126 or whether the conditional clause in
statement 5 is as straightforward and logical as Montgomery asserts.127 I
believe that there are serious theological difficulties with each of these state-
ments (except for 4, which is purely methodological and therefore not a
theological or historical assertion). Rather, it is that the "shape" of his argu-
ment is exactly the opposite of the kind of argumentation employed by
philosophers of science, arguments which Montgomery used to illuminate
the meaning and validity of theological science. Wittgenstein and Ramsey
both took data or facts to be objective not in the sense of being knowable
(much less known) with certainty by the mind a priori, but rather as being
that to which the mind constantly must return in its attempt to organize what
it encounters outside itself into knowable units of information understandable
to itself. Imagination, the source of that which is "new" to the observations
made by the mind, is thus indispensable to the organization of observations
into knowledge. Montgomery's method reverses this process and in so doing
negates the contribution of imagination altogether. Instead of the mind con-
tributing to observations in such a manner as (ultimately) to arrive at certain-
ty, the mind begins with the certainty of biblical data, accepts the norms or
principles within those data as authoritative and justified indicators of how
to evaluate them, and tken simply draws inferences and conclusions from
them.128 The contribution of the mind, therefore, is analogous to the person
who encounters true major and minor premises in a syllogism and "con-
tributes" a justified conclusion. Whatever that contribution is, it is hardly
imagination.
The reader would thus need to know whence arises Montgomery's "cer-
34 Evangelical Theories of Biblical Inspiration
The criterion which we use to test the genuineness of apparent statements of fact
is the criterion of verifiability. We say that a sentence is factually significant to
any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which
it purports to express—that is, if he knows what observations would lead him,
under certain conditions, to accept that proposition as being true, or reject it as
being false.139
text of Scripture which is normative for Christian theology, but rather the
presuppositions of its authors. Inspiration thus has to do not with the text,
which is publicly available today, but with interior mental processes which, if
they were ever available, certainly are not today. According to his argument,
inductive inerrancy is a characteristic of the text which is apparent to all clear
thinkers who are not predisposed to reject it. According to his explanation of
the argument, however, inductive inerrancy is a characteristic of the marriage
of the verifiability principle and the presuppositions of the biblical authors,
neither of which is a textual element. It is therefore fair to conclude that
Montgomery's account of religious certainty fails to show how that certainty
is based in the Bible.
Montgomery sets himself an energetic task: to account for the certainty of
Christian faith based upon the truthfulness of the Bible as determined both by
generally accepted historical principles and by the verificationist discoveries
of twentieth-century philosophy of science. Even if he had been successful,
however, and there is good reason to think that he was not, it seems to miss
the point of religious certainty. All that Montgomery's apologetic intends to
do is demonstrate the reliability of the biblical authors as historians since, as
we have seen, he takes their writings as straightforward historical assertions
whose truthfulness can be judged entirely apart from the consideration of
"faith." But it is a huge leap from saying that they are reliable historians to
the profession of belief in Jesus as the Christ and as God incarnate. Historical
accuracy per se is not a distinctively Christian criterion, and telling the truth in
matters historical is not identical with Christian faith. Faith is self-involving,
and as Donald Evans reminds us, self-involving claims "involve a speaker
logically in something more than a mere assent to fact."145 Typically, that
"something more" is commitment to some kind of present and future action,
whereas the only commitment called for by "assent to fact" is that which
affirms the correspondence between a given sentence and a given state of
affairs. In claiming correctness for the biblical authors, Montgomery fails
to inspect how their correct words are perceived as that kind of truth which
would lead a reader in the present to commit his or her life to a certain set
of actions and beliefs within a community of faith. Historical accuracy alone
cannot elicit an appropriate confession of faith.
hand, error is incompatible with God's character and anything God does.
On the other hand, present copies of the Bible contain errors. Such errors,
however, do not restrict God's ability to work through the Bible but instead
may become the very means by which God brings about repentance.
Religion, for Carnell, is the human response to "soul-sorrow," the realiza-
tion of the "insatiable desire for self-preservation [in the face of] the realities
of a death-doomed body and an impersonal universe."149 Because there is
no area of life which can escape these realities, it is imperative for religion
to be on the surest possible footing as it suggests responses both to account
for and to overcome this fatal realization. Thus, "one can easily detect that
the basic problem of religion is verification, since it is always theoretically
possible that what has been conceived to be God . . . is in reality nothing but
the fruit of an auto-projection."150
Three types of verification systems are considered. The first is "demon-
strative" or logical proof. This approach is useful in that it helps one "to
segregate the true from the false" in systems of thought. It is not sufficient
or ultimate, though, because "reality cannot be connected by formal logic
alone. . . . Logical truth cannot pass into material truth until the facts of
life are introduced into the picture."151 This factor necessitates a second sys-
tematic approach, "inductive" proof. This system of proof deals with the
"concrete history" that comprises much of human life, such as weighing,
measuring, experimenting, and the like. The risk involved in inductive proof
is that it can only be probable proof; it cannot account for the certainty which
the mind desires in the act of knowing. What would be optimum would be
the uniting of these two, a union Carnell discovers in the third system, proof
by "systematic consistency" or "coherence."
Systematic consistency applies to all experience. Formal (or logical) veri-
fiability ensures the "universality and necessity" of this method, and material
(or inductive) verifiability ensures its "relevance to the world in which we
live."152 Carnell does not, however, explain the method of systematic con-
sistency in such a way as to give equal weight to both the formal and the
material aspects. Instead, as I will show, the ultimate criterion of meaning-
fulness is logical consistency as tested by the law of contradiction.
Systematic consistency is presented as that method which alone is able
to account for all of human experience, which Carnell defines as the "total
breadth of human consciousness which embraces the entire rational, volitional
and emotional life of man."153 As its name implies, there are two aspects
to this method. "Consistency" implies obedience to the law of contradiction,
defined in its traditional form of "A is not non-A." It is primarily a negative
test and thus is "our surest test for the absence of truth."154 That is, the law
of contradiction cannot demonstrate that rabbits exist but only that rabbits,
if they exist, cannot be sheep, if sheep exist. This type of proof thus stands in
40 Evangelical Theories of Biblical Inspiration
Conclusion
The four theories considered in this chapter represent various points along
a single spectrum. In simple terms, that spectrum is comprised of theories
of inspiration which either ignore or neglect various factors involved in any
act of inspiration. It has not been shown, nor would I claim, that these
oversights were malicious in the sense of being deliberate attempts to deceive
interested persons and communities. What has been claimed, though, is
that the authors considered have in various ways commonly overlooked
the possibility of examining nonreligious instances of inspiration in order
to determine their potential for illuminating the phenomenon of biblical
inspiration. Rather than beginning with the familiar and journeying to the
unfamiliar, a genuinely inductive approach, these theorists begin with their
understanding of the doctrine of God. This understanding is then joined with
a particular anthropology which entails that all communication from God
to persons be inerrant. The exemplar of this communication is variously
portrayed as a prophet (Hodge), a secretary (Warfield), and a historian
(Montgomery). Each of these ways assumes that inspiration is a concept
according to which human beings are passive, whether as vehicles or as
receivers.
If there is a single way to summarize my objection to deductivist theories,
it is that they have not been shown to be theories of inspiration. As we shall
see in Chapter 3, inspiration as a concept refers to the indirect influence
which one agent exercises (sometimes unknowingly) within another agent's
life. Beyond this, nothing can be specified in advance with respect to matters
of truth and accuracy on the one hand or the degree of contribution by the
inspired agent on the other.
Here it is appropriate to pause and reflect upon what the deductivists were
up to in their distinctive manner of explaining biblical inspiration. What
we saw clearly in Warfield may be said of the others as well: "the church
doctrine of the Bible" is more concerned with how theologians said that the
Bible was composed than with how the Bible inspires the church. Why is
that? It should be noted that I am not pointing out once again that some
who claimed to be inductivists were in fact deductivists. Rather, I am asking
another kind of question entirely: why were those who were most insistent
about the complete uniqueness of the Bible so willing to merge their ad hoc
explanations of its origins with lengthy discussions of what tradition claimed
about the Bible?
I can only suggest an answer to this question at this time, although we shall
encounter the subject again in the final chapter. Unwittingly, most probably,
these deductivists themselves have provided a response. In spending time
discussing "the church doctrine of the Bible," they illustrated the closeness
46 Evangelical Theories of Biblical Inspiration
of the relationship between the church and the Bible. That is, they showed
that the Bible launched the church and continues to launch it today. The
church depends upon the Bible in a way that individuals, for example, do
not. Individuals would and do continue to survive regardless of the existence
of the Bible, but that cannot be said of the church. Thus, the church has an
essential stake in accounting for the effects of the Bible within it both long
ago and at present.
On the surface, the deductivists we have considered unanimously took
inspiration to apply to the words of the Bible. But they left room below the
surface for an understanding of inspiration which views the church rather
than the Bible as its primary product.179 Far from seeing the deductivists
merely as methodologically inconsistent in their intention to treat the church
doctrine of inspiration, perhaps we should interpret them instead as straining
to put into words what their tradition could not admit: that the real effect of
inspiration is the existence of the church as a community of believers rather
than a peculiar configuration of words which itself is alleged to demonstrate
divinity. This interpretation admittedly strains at gnats with respect to Hodge,
Warfield, Montgomery, and Carnell. It does, nevertheless, make sense of
what is otherwise anomalous in their works: the tenacity with which they
attempted to explain what they insisted was inexplicable.
2
Inductivist Theories
of Biblical Inspiration
47
48 Evangelical Theories of Biblical Inspiration
Formally, the types of means through which some agents inspire others
are irrelevant to the concept of inspiration. What is relevant, especially in
contrast to deductivist theories of biblical inspiration, is that the two termini
of inspiration are both known agents, and in addition that there is always a
means of inspiration. The search for an adequate account of inspiration must
begin with these agents. Because of the difficulties generated by deductivist
accounts which begin with the inspiring agent (God), the inductivist approach
begins with the more familiar agent, the person whose experience of God
has been inspired by means of the Bible.
As in the previous chapter, I have chosen to address the following theolo-
gians because of the differences in how they employ the inductive approach.
Augustus H. Strong calls attention to the faith of the inspired person as a
datum which deductivists overlooked but which can scarcely be ignored if
one intends to discover what Christian inspiration is. Bernard Ramm calls our
attention to two theological activities, inspiration and "the internal witness of
the Holy Spirit." Although he does not explicitly relate them, I shall. I shall
further claim that the internal witness functions as a theory of inspiration
in that it is a beginning account of how the mind grasps religious matters.
Finally, William Abraham performs the long-awaited task of exploring an
actual instance of human or personal inspiration in order to determine how
one ought to expect biblical inspiration to function. Along the way, he also
draws attention to the unconscious identification of divine inspiration and
divine speaking, an identification which, he believes, accounts for why so
many evangelicals believe that the Bible is inerrant. It will be seen that
inductivism is generally more successful at illuminating the activity or pro-
cess of inspiration than was deductivism. We shall take from inductivists
what we can and then proceed to other resources to help us in continuing the
task of identifying biblical inspiration. The inductivists studied here represent
an advance over their deductivist counterparts, but there is still more to an
adequate conception of inspiration than what they give us.
Augustus H. Strong
Augustus H. Strong (1836-1921) was professor of biblical theology at the
Rochester Theological Seminary in Rochester, New York, and served as its
president from 1872 to 1912. At the beginning of what remains one of the
most comprehensive analyses of Strong's theology, Carl F. H. Henry notes
that he has been called "one of the four most influential Baptist theological
teachers of his period."1 He is important for this particular study, however,
because he is one of the first evangelicals to attempt to account for the
inspiration of the Bible in internal rather than external categories. That is, at
the very time during which the Princeton school was developing an account
Inductivist Theories of Biblical Inspiration 49
human nature and its relation to the world. The direction of Strong's reason-
ing here is significant. He argues from the more certain to the less certain,
from anthropology to theology. The certainty of Christian theology is for
him not a given and unexamined datum: "We conclude that, in theology, we
are ... warranted in assuming that the laws of our thought are laws of God's
thought, and that the results of normally conducted thinking with regard to
God correspond to the objective reality."7
In thus optimistically estimating the possibility of human cognition to know
certainly, even if not always with certainty warranted by evidence, 8 does
Strong preclude the necessity of divine revelation? He does not. In fact, his
understanding of the necessity and formal meaning of revelation is nearly
identical with those of Hodge and Warfield: "Man's intellectual and moral
nature requires, in order to preserve it from constant deterioration, and to
ensure its moral growth and progress, an authoritative and helpful revelation
of religious truth, of a higher and completer sort than any to which, in its
present state of sin, it can attain by the use of its unaided powers."9 Strong
elaborates by pointing to the same elements that Warfield had noted: humans
need an "external" revelation because of both cognitive finitude and sinful
habitude. Certain questions cannot be answered by reason or intuition, and
others are actively resisted by the will. Thus, "we need a special revelation
of the merciful and helpful aspect of the divine nature."10
From the necessity of revelation we are brought to the consideration of
inspiration. For Strong, as for the other inductivists this chapter treats,
"inspiration" is the theological description of that activity of the human
mind which is most susceptible to divine interaction. It is first and foremost,
though, an act located in the mind, and it must be understood as such.
Inspiration thus cannot be understood as an a priori scheme to which both
human knowing and the Scriptures must be conformed.
Strong begins his treatment of inspiration" with its definition:
Inspiration is that influence of the Spirit of God upon the minds of the Scripture
writers which made their writings the record of a progressive divine revelation,
sufficient, when taken together and interpreted by the same Spirit who inspired
them, to lead every honest inquirer to Christ and to salvation.
There are striking differences between this definition and that of Warfield,
for example. Both call inspiration an "influence" upon the biblical writers.
Strong, though, understands inspiration to guarantee a "secure transmission
of needed truth to the future"12 so that the honest inquirer may have sufficient
reason to decide, if in fact he or she does decide, that what the Bible witnesses
to is actually what God reveals concerning Himself and His relation to the
world. Warfield, on the other hand, sees the effect of inspiration not as being
a witness to divine truth but as actually producing discernible characteristics
Inductivist Theories of Biblical Inspiration 51
interpenetration and indwelling of the divine Spirit."18 Thus, far from natural
abilities and fallibilities being overwhelmed by the process of inspiration,
Strong seems rather to countenance the view that human nature is brought
closer to its ideal expression when interpenetrated by the divine: "man is
never more fully himself than when God works in and through him."19 He
follows this argument not just to the point of cultural and literary style, as
had Warfield, but also to the point of scientific and historical errors.
Inspiration as a process is "dynamical" rather than "mechanical."20 By this
Strong means to say that every psychological phenomenon present within the
knowing consciousness in nonreligious cognitive acts must be accounted for
in religious cognitive acts as well. 21 This in turn means that the Scriptures
cannot be said a priori to be errorless. Perhaps they do contain errors, but
if so, then those errors are not located within the scope of those things-
concerning which the Scriptures have already been taken to be authoritative,
that is, matters of "faith and practice."22
At first glance this appears to violate Strong's inductivism since it presumes
that errors and authority are mutually exclusive. There are several ways to
test this conclusion, the first being the way Carnell treated them. The second
way, which we shall now consider in some detail, is that Strong introduces
the principle of the "intention of Scripture" as a critical factor distinguishing
legitimate from illegitimate23 uses and analyses of the Bible. "Inspiration
did not guarantee inerrancy in things not essential to the main purpose of
Scripture. [It] went no further than to secure a trustworthy transmission by the
sacred writers of the truth they were commissioned to deliver." He elaborates
by saying flatly that "God can use imperfect means. . . . [As] God reveals
himself in nature and history in spite of their shortcomings, so inspiration can
accomplish its purpose through both writers and writings in some respects
imperfect."24 The purpose of Scripture must then be determined a posteriori,
and it is that purpose realized in the lives of believers which is the effect of
biblical inspiration.
The authority of Scripture is not to be located in the words of Scripture,
as though they could have an authoritative status apart from their reception
and appropriation by the believer. The authority of the words of the Bible
cannot in fact be separated from the effect which they exercise in the life of
the believing community, although these may be distinguished for heuristic
purposes. But the effect of the words of the Bible is belief, that is to say,
the appropriation of the Bible's witness to God's love for the world in Jesus
Christ. For Strong, as for Luther, "the central subject and thought which
binds all parts of the Bible together, and in the light of which they are to be
interpreted, is the person and work of Jesus Christ."25 As a hermeneutical
key, however, the centrality of Jesus Christ in the Bible is a factor which
will be relevant only to those who already understand and accept the message
Inductivist Theories of Biblical Inspiration 53
of Jesus in their lives as members of the believing community. That is, the
hermeneutical significance of Christ must in the very nature of the case follow
upon the religious perception of Jesus as constitutive of God's gracious act
within the world and especially within the community of Christian faith.
The authority of Scripture, then, is its indispensability in witnessing to
the relationship which God establishes with the world through the Church.
"While inspiration constitutes Scripture an authority more trustworthy than
are individual reason or the creeds of the church, the only ultimate authority
is Christ himself. . . . In thus judging Scripture and interpreting Scripture, we
are not rationalists, but are rather believers in him who promised to be with
us alway [sic] even unto the end of the world and to lead us by his Spirit into
all the truth."26 The authority of Scripture is thus a conditional authority. It is
conditional upon the religious appropriation of its central message, a message
which itself is taken by Christians to be a universal truth: God's love for and
acceptance of the world as shown in Jesus the Christ.
It thus appears that Strong in part shares with Warfield an unwillingness
to allow authority or normativity to coexist with error. That unwillingness
led Warfield to reject error anywhere in the Bible, whereas it leads Strong
to reject it only in those parts of the Bible which involve the intention of
Scripture, that is, the religious significance of Jesus. In principle, though,
the positions seem to be identical. In order to determine whether they are,
we shall consider his treatment of biblical errors.
Having specified that the purpose of the Scriptures is incoherent if the
faith of the believer is overlooked, we would expect Strong to discuss actual
instances of the "imperfect means" of the Bible. Curiously though, especially
in view of his insistence that the category of biblical errors must be relative
to matters of faith and practice rather than to matters of science in its modern
sense, he is most unwilling to admit of any errors in the Bible. He considers
ten separate classes of alleged errors27 and finds no justified indictment in
any of them. Taking the class of historical errors as an example, we find
Strong responding that present "errors" may result from fallible copyists, the
"permissible use of round numbers," and the differing cultural and intentional
perspectives of the writers. He finishes, though, by insisting once again that
"inspiration is still consistent with much imperfection in historical detail and
its narratives do not seem to be exempted from possibilities of error."28
This insistence upon the "actual" errorlessness of the Bible results from
the convergence of two emphases and not from a third, as may be illus-
trated by examining Strong's terse dismissal of the apologetic importance of
the autographs.29 The two emphases which do inform Strong's conclusion
concerning errors are, as we have seen, his specification of the purpose of
Scripture as being soteriological and his insistence that God can and usually
does work through fallible means to accomplish His will. What seems less
54 Evangelical Theories of Biblical Inspiration
of this one, it would seem, simply because no other group finds the Bible to
be religiously inspired. As Hodge reminded us, theory need not go beyond
facts.
Is Strong completely innocent of the charge of a recalcitrant a priori
attitude concerning the compatibility of authority and errors? Probably not.
We have seen that, unlike Warfield, he clearly asserts that no contradiction
exists between them. And we have seen that the force of this assertion for
Strong does not rest upon the autographs. However, we have also waited in
vain for Strong to consider any actual error, regardless of how seemingly
insignificant, even if only to show that it really is irrelevant to faith and
practice. He does just the opposite and, like Hodge, affirms the possibility
but not the actuality of errors in the Bible.
We are now able to address a final element in Strong's theory of inspira-
tion, an element which is initially puzzling in view of his insistence upon
the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit as that which finally "proves" the
inspiration of the Bible. Strong writes that "miracles and prophecies" attest
to the genuineness of both revelation and inspiration and that the modern
believer might be strengthened in accepting both because of the evidential
effects of those events: "A miracle is an event in nature, so extraordinary in
itself . . . as fully to warrant the conviction, on the part of those who witness
it, that God has wrought it with the design of certifying that this teacher or
leader has been commissioned by Him."35 Why this inclusion of external
evidence within accounts of revelation and inspiration which are otherwise
grounded on the internal phenomenon of personal faith?
It appears that this question is substantive and that Strong did perhaps retain
elements of external verification within his inspiration theory. Miracles not
only coincide with "purity of life and doctrine" to underscore the validity of
a person's writing; they also at times "primarily and directly certify to the
divine commission and authority of a religious teacher." When these three
factors converge, they "mutually support each other, and form parts of one
whole. . . . The authority of Christ as a teacher of supernatural truth rests
upon his miracles, and especially upon the miracle of his resurrection."36
Because Strong is ambiguous concerning the status of externals such as
miracles and prophecies as evidences which attest to and strengthen faith,
rather than faith perceiving certain events as miraculous or prophetic, the
reader alone is finally responsible for settling upon an interpretation of Strong
which makes greatest sense out of the ambiguity.
Two avenues of approach are available to the interpreter who wishes to
see continuity in Strong's theory. The first recognizes his acceptance of the
coincidence of divine and natural activities in general. Divine activity may
be discerned in all natural events, not solely in the extraordinary events
of theophany, miracle, prophecy, and the like, since "natural law [is] the
56 Evangelical Theories of Biblical Inspiration
method of God's regular activity." God is immanent within nature, and His
activity may be described as "immediate agency."37 Extraordinary events
may be clearer instances of God's purposive power at work, but they are
not categorically distinct from other phenomena which believers accept as
attestations of faith. 38 But neither are they distinct from the type of evidence
accepted as sufficient for justifying beliefs in the natural or scientific realm
since, as we saw earlier, science and theology are but two aspects of the
same cognitive process. Miracle is not an intervention of God into the
laws of nature. The perspective which believes that it is an intervention
is unwarranted because God, as "principle of all growth and evolution,"39
would thus be separated from the usual means used to accomplish His
purposes in the world. Instead, miracle is an especially clear manifestation
of the divine presence which is the condition of all proper thinking.40
The conclusion seems justified, then, that miracles attest the inspiration of
the Bible, but not in a way that logically undercuts and overwhelms unbelief,
which is the traditional way of thinking about miracles. Instead, the miracle
which attests inspiration is the insight, mediated through the Bible, that
God is copresent in all worldly events, including in particular the event of
perceiving the Bible itself as the word of God.
The second avenue of approach is similar to one we have already noticed
in Strong, namely, that the persons upon whom the attestation of miracles
and prophecy is said to work are believing persons. That is, they are persons
who already recognize and confess the existence of God and "who see in
Christ none other than the immanent God manifested to creatures."41 For
such persons, conversion to Christian thinking means that Christ is taken to
be creator, as well as redeemer, of the world. The centrality of Strong's
christology is evident in the following passage:
The second [person of the Trinity] is called the Word of God, and it is intimated
that he constitutes the principle of objectification, consciousness, intelligence
within the divine nature, and the principle of expression, manifestation, revela-
tion, by which God is made known to other beings than himself. Christ, then,
is the Reason, Wisdom and Power of God in exercise. . . . Since Christ is the
principle of revelation in God, we may say that God never thought, said, or did
anything except through Christ.42
The evidence which miracles and prophecy provide the believer, while "ex-
ternal" to the consideration of inspiration per se, is not external to that belief
structure as a whole which sees Christ as the self-disclosure of God in granting
salvation and in the operations of the world. "Miracle and prophecy" mean
that God's transcendence is not restricted to the supernatural and the extraor-
dinary, and that human beings may therefore become what they themselves
cannot accomplish. Biblical inspiration refers in particular to the realization
Inductivist Theories of Biblical Inspiration 57
that the transcendent God is discerned as the ultimate source of the humanly
authored biblical message.
We have seen that Strong's theory of inspiration is conditional upon faith;
the assessment of the authority of the Scriptures cannot be independent of
the acceptance or rejection of the message of the Scriptures. It is conditional
as well in that Strong is unwilling to insist upon the structure of his theory
as the only possible account of the importance of the Bible in the life of the
believing community:
Although we propose this ... theory as one which best explains the Scripture
facts, we do not regard this or any other theory as of essential importance.
No theory of inspiration is necessary to Christian faith. . . . The fault of many
past discussions of the subject is the assumption that God must adopt some
particular method of inspiration, or secure an absolute perfection in detail in
matters not essential to the religious teaching of Scripture. Perhaps the best
theory of inspiration is to have no theory at all.
Bernard Ramm
Bernard Ramm (born 1916) is a Baptist pastor, professor, and theologian.
He has taught in a variety of Christian colleges and seminaries in the United
States and abroad and has also been involved with such evangelical organiza-
tions as Young Life and World Vision. He has authored more than one hun-
dred articles and nearly twenty books on topics including Christian education,
ethics, exegesis, hermeneutics, apologetics, and fundamentalism. His most
recent book explores the methodological differences between fundamental-
ism and evangelicalism.46 The basic difference between them, he says, is
that evangelicalism is open to the advances in critical understanding offered
58 Evangelical Theories of Biblical Inspiration
plished Ramm does not say. In another place he settles for the traditional
disclaimer that inspiration is not mechanical in the sense of dictation theories
but that beyond that "Christian speculation" could not go.60
It would seem, though, that Ramm is not sufficiently faithful to his own
emphases here. In denying the appropriateness of "speculation" concerning
the operation of inspiration, he overlooks his insistence upon redemption and
revelation as necessarily prior to inspiration. If "the function of revelation [is]
to bring to the sinner a soteric knowledge of God," 6I then the only persons
who find the Scriptures to be inspired are those who are "saved," that is,
those who accept the witness of redemption. The realization of Scriptures
as inspired is necessarily consequent upon their having inspired someone. In
the absence of that which the Scriptures inspire —divine salvation —logically
there can be no inspiration to consider, since the appropriation of divine
salvation is always prior to inspiration in the theological ordering of these
doctrines. It would seem, then, that to consider the notion of biblical inspi-
ration abstractly, as though it were intelligible apart from the reception of
redemptive activity, is impossible.62 But this is not a conclusion of mere
"speculation." It is, instead, consonant with his doctrinal ordering of redemp-
tion, revelation, and inspiration, and also with Christian experience.
Enough has been said by this point to show that Ramm's understanding
of the inspiration of the Bible necessarily includes reference to the believer
whose salvation has been inspired by (or, more accurately, through) the
Bible. Furthermore, this understanding is a recognition, not of the "divine
qualities" of the Bible per se (whatever that would mean), but rather of
the satisfactoriness of that to which the Bible witnesses as salvation from
sin. "Inspiration" is thus a reflective term in the sense that it refers to a
complex past experience: the experience of salvation in the present which
is consonant with the salvation experienced by those persons and groups
of persons portrayed in the Bible. It would, accordingly, be anomalous for
persons to look for instances of where the Bible is inspired; rather, one looks
for instances of where the Bible has inspired.
With respect to the notion of inspiration thus understood, the question
now becomes how to describe the "process of transition" from an outlook
not biblically inspired or shaped to one which is. How, that is, does Ramm
suggest that inspiration inspires? It is here that I come to a conclusion that
Ramm never explicitly drew but which is at once a sympathetic interpretation
of him and also a significant contribution to an evangelical doctrine of biblical
inspiration. In brief, what Ramm carefully explains as John Calvin's "internal
testimony of the Holy Spirit," or the testimonium, is the functional equivalent
of inspiration.63
Ramm begins his treatment of Calvin's doctrine of the testimonium by
noting that the uncertainty of its derivation in Calvin does not obscure its
Inductivist Theories of Biblical Inspiration 61
Nor can any specific notion of inspiration be gleaned from the testimonium. The
witness of the Spirit illuminates the mind to the truth of the gospel, and to the
divine authority of the documents which contain it. But it does not speak to the
origin, mode of writing, or degree of inspiration. The persuasion is a persuasion
to truthfulness. It is the simple, direct assent of the mind. But a special doctrine
of inspiration would be a matter of knowledge and therefore would be out of
keeping with the structure of the testimonium.
William J. Abraham
William J. Abraham (born 1947) is a Methodist pastor and professor from
Northern Ireland. He has been Lecturer in Philosophy of Religion and Chris-
tian Ethics at Queen's University in Belfast, and Assistant Professor of The-
ology at Seattle Pacific University. Currently he is professor of theology at
Perkins School of Theology of Southern Methodist University.
Abraham's work on biblical inspiration80 contributes to this essay in several
significant ways. First, he stands within the Wesleyan tradition of evangeli-
calism, a tradition which has not yet been represented in this study. 81 Second,
he not only refers to himself as an "inductivist," but intentionally analyzes
nonreligious instances of inspiration in order to discover what light they might
shed on the matter of scriptural inspiration. Third, Abraham takes seriously
the distinction between revelation and inspiration, a distinction blurred by
deductivists, as we have seen.82 An important implication of this distinction
is that, while the church no longer expects canonical revelation to occur,
divine inspiration does occur in the present. Fourth, and perhaps most impor-
tantly, his method of inquiry is similar to the one I will develop in subsequent
chapters, a method which is particularly appreciative of Thomas Aquinas. 83
We may thus hope to discover in Abraham an ally in the development of
a theory of inspiration which is sensitive both to contemporary theological
insights and to the broad tradition of evangelicalism.
The Divine Inspiration of Holy Scripture is a deliberate attempt both to
criticize evangelical theories of biblical inspiration and "to offer a positive
account of inspiration that is contemporary, coherent and credible. . . . My
basic contention is that we can have a more adequate account of inspiration
than that which became standard orthodoxy in the last generation."84 Abra-
ham's primary criticism of such theories is that they all85 fail to take the
concept of inspiration seriously. Instead, they depend, consciously or other-
wise, upon the notion of divine speaking as the primary and often exclusive
model of inspiration. The Old Testament prophet, the person who is alleged
to have spoken exactly and only those words which God wished to have
spoken, is taken as the paradigmatic illustration of inspiration.
Abraham rejects the identity of inspiration and speaking:
Inductivist Theories of Biblical Inspiration 65
Any responsible and coherent account of inspiration must at least begin with
the possibility that there is as much difference between divine inspiration and
divine speaking as there is between human inspiration and human speaking. It
must consider as a live option that divine inspiration is a basic act or activity of
God that is not reducible to other divine acts or activity. It must not be confused
with other activity of God, whether this be the creative activity of God or the
speaking activity of God. 86
As remedy for the problems generated by this identification,87 and thus as
starting point for an "adequate" theory of inspiration, Abraham suggests an
analysis of the concept of inspiration as that term is used "in the common
world of human agents. . . . [We] must first consider the word 'inspire' as it
applies to human agents, if we are ever to understand it as it applied [sic] to
God."88 Thus, the reader expects Abraham to avoid "two fatal mistakes"89 in
the theory of inspiration which he constructs. The first is that of "beginning,
continuing, and ending" with a doctrine of God, and the second is the
reduction of inspiration to the mode of speaking.
Abraham takes as a "paradigm case of inspiration . . . a teacher inspiring
his students."90 The examination of such a case will reveal much about the
concept of inspiration which will be useful in the attempt to understand
divine inspiration specifically. Abraham first notes that inspiration is more a
predicate of the student than of the teacher. That is, in any purported instance
of inspiration, one's attention is first drawn to the person inspired and only
then to the person inspiring and the mode of inspiration. Further, the natural
differences among students lead one to anticipate a variety of "degrees of
inspiration." The effects of an inspiring teacher will not be identical among
all of that person's students. In addition, because students are active and not
passive in the process of learning, their native intelligence and talent "will
be greatly enhanced and enriched" as they experience the inspiring teacher.
Natural faculties are in fact the object or intention of inspiration, and it is
thus intrinsic to the notion of inspiration that there be positive enhancement
of them.91 With respect to the student, then, the final point is that inspiration
itself is no guarantee of either complete accuracy or complete fidelity to the
teacher. One thinks in this regard of the preface in a book, where the author
acknowledges the positive influence of colleagues but dissociates them from
any mistakes included in it.
Abraham next turns to the actual activity or mode of inspiration. He
calls attention to the fact that inspiring is not done alongside other teaching
activities but is rather accomplished "in, with and through" those other
activities.92 A farmer, for example, does not "farm" in addition to plowing,
milking, planting, and harvesting. Rather, one who does these activities is
66 Evangelical Theories of Biblical Inspiration
farming. Thus, it is also the case that inspiration is quite often unintentional
and even unconscious on the part of the teacher. What the teacher may
consider quite routine, the students may find inspirational.
Finally, Abraham notes the effects of inspiration, especially that there is
no single or sufficient indicator of its presence. Several "strands of evidence"
must be present for an observer to conclude that a student has been inspired
by the teacher. The foremost indicator, of course, is the testimony of the
individual student. Other indicators may be "continuity of interests, outlook,
and perhaps even style of approach to the issue at hand."93 In the case of a
group of inspired students, furthermore, a comparison of their work with that
of their teacher will yield both similarities and dissimilarities. The similarity
reflects the single source of their inspiration, while the dissimilarity reflects
the original contributions of their learning faculties in interaction with what
is communicated to them by their teacher. The degree of unity may not
be specified in advance because inspiration is not mimicking. Nor may the
degree of diversity be nredicted, although Abraham does not say why.
His silence here is unfortunate, for it is precisely at the point of legiti-
mate latitude or degree of difference that evangelicals have been especially
perplexed. Precisely understood, though, we would argue that the question
concerning the limits of diversity with respect to the meaning of inspiration
is the same as whether a biblical writing or assertion may be considered
inspired if it does not enhance one's understanding and experience of God.
Seen in this light, the only available criterion for evaluating the limits of
acceptable diversity is the practical or historical assessment of whether a
particular narrative or assertion has in fact inspired the Christian community
to (re)formulate understanding of the God-human relationship. If it has not
so influenced the community, then it cannot claim to be inspired.94
Abraham next inspects the teacher-student paradigm to determine its appro-
priateness as an analogy for understanding divine inspiration. How far, in
other words, does "the term [have] to be qualified when it is predicted of
God"? Two qualifications are relevant here. The first and more important
is that the paradigm is "highly intellectualistic," perhaps overly so. That is,
it does not do full justice to the wide range of divine redemptive activities
"through which God has inspired the writers of the Bible." The relationship
between teacher and student is characteristically an informative or instruc-
tional one in which the student directly learns about a particular subject matter
and only indirectly about the teacher. But not all acts of God are instructional
in the sense of being communications of information. For example, Abraham
notes that little if anything is learned about the character of God in the ongo-
ing activity of the divine sustenance of the world outside of the fact that God
"sustains" the world, a fact which one can learn perhaps even more directly
Inductivist Theories of Biblical Inspiration 67
from other sources. Nothing new is learned from reflecting upon "this" or
"that" actual instance of divine sustenance. Yet the absence of a new datum
of communicated information does not preclude the possibility of a person's
being inspired (for example) to become more caring and considerate of others
as a result of reflecting upon a given instance of God's sustaining the world.
Inspiration is broader than strict communication of information.95 It may
occur along with the communication of information, but to identify the two
activities is, strictly speaking, to confuse inspiration with revelation.
The second way in which the paradigm of instructional inspiration needs
to be modified when used as an analogy for divine inspiration is not so
much a qualification as a reminder that inspiration is not the straightforward
enterprise that the deductivists took it to be. Instances of inspiration are
difficult enough to justify in the case of teachers and students for reasons
already noted, and additionally because not all students of a particular teacher
will be inspired by him or her. With respect to God, though, who "is not
an agent who can be located in the world of space and time," claims of
inspiration will be vastly more complicated and thus even more difficult to
certify. This reminder serves to underscore the similarity between divine and
human instances of inspiration, and not to distinguish them.
The warning, though, is well heeded. The claim of a community to
have been inspired by the Bible is initially a claim about the community's
relationship with God and only then a claim about the Bible. Thus, the
methodological attempt to understand such a claim must begin with the
influence the Bible has had in that community; only then is it able to proceed
to the question of the inspiring qualities of the Bible itself. A teacher who
has not inspired students cannot be called an inspiring teacher, for without
the effects there is no cause to consider. So, too, the attempt to understand
the inspiration of the Bible begins with the inspection of a biblically inspired
community.
Abraham believes that a significant correlative to his discussion of inspi-
ration, in particular the distinction of inspiration and revelation, is that inspi-
ration is not a divine activity strictly limited to the process of producing the
Bible. Inspiration refers instead to a process in which one agent initiates an
enhancing and enriching of another agent's knowing faculties: "Through his
mighty acts of the past and through his continued activity in the present God
continues to inspire his people."
It is only because of the confusion of inspiration and revelation that many
evangelicals have attempted to account for the authority of Scripture with
reference to inspiration rather than to revelation. The error of this account
of authority is seen the more clearly that inspiration is seen as referring
to enhancement and revelation as referring to content. When inspiration is
68 Evangelical Theories of Biblical Inspiration
The other value contributed by the paradigm of teacher and student is found
as much in its use in the first place as in any particular conclusion to be drawn
from it. Abraham's choice of what we have called an interpersonal instance of
inspiration is significant in itself. It signals a methodological approach which
is, for the first time in all of the theologians we have considered, deliberately
inductive in form. In beginning with the consideration of inspiration among
humans and then proceeding to the consideration of the divine inspiration of
humans by way of stripping from the human examples those elements not
appropriate to the divine, Abraham neatly illustrates the approach of Thomas
in the Summa Theologiae, I, 3, Introduction:
Now we cannot know how God is, but only how he is not; we must therefore
consider the ways in which God does not exist, rather than the ways in which
he does. . . . The ways in which God does not exist will become apparent if we
rule out from [the consideration of] him everything inappropriate [to him].
It is only those who already know God in some manner who can know the
difference between appropriate and inappropriate statements concerning him.
Both Thomas and Abraham presume in their very manner of approach that
those who participate in their inquiries (concerning, respectively, the nature
of God and religious language, and the nature of inspiration) already possess
faith in God.98 Without danger of oversimplification, therefore, we may say
that the major distinction separating deductive from inductive conceptions of
biblical inspiration is the recognition by the latter that the faith perspective
of the person or the community is a necessary constituent in the concept
of inspiration. The analysis of inspiration begins with those who have been
inspired.
Abraham has contributed much to a concept of inspiration for considera-
tion by evangelicals. He has not, however, completed the task as he led his
readers to expect. In his introduction, for example, the reader is promised
"an adequate account of inspiration."99 And in his conclusion to the chap-
ter on "The Concept of Inspiration" Abraham says, "In the course of this
chapter I have attempted to provide and defend a positive account of divine
inspiration. If the substance of this analysis is correct, then a coherent and
serviceable doctrine has been furnished for the contemporary theologian."100
It is my contention that Abraham has begun, but not completed, this task. In
particular, what he has failed to provide is an account of the divine inspiration
of Scripture. That is, he has said that God inspires the Christian community
to salvation by means of the Bible, but he has not shown how God does
that or how the community knows that it is God who ultimately initiates the
salvation. In the final chapters of this book, I shall address these questions.
Abraham's enduring contribution is that the discussion of inspiration must
begin by accounting for the act of personal consciousness that accepts the bib-
70 Evangelical Theories of Biblical Inspiration
Conclusion
At the conclusion of Chapter 1, it was noted that deductivist accounts of
inspiration uniformly avoided being accounts of inspiration. Instead I noted
that they were ad hoc accounts of the "extraordinary status" of the words of
the Bible which were uncritically grounded in the doctrine of God.101 This
chapter introduced us to a second weakness of deductivist approaches, which
is that they neglect to see the tripartite structure of the concept of inspiration.
The three categories of this concept are, in Abraham's terms, the inspiring
agent, the means of inspiration, and the inspired agent. Deductivist theories
either fail to see these three categories or at best conflate the second and
third, in their restriction of biblical inspiration to the words and authors of
Scripture.
In different ways, Strong, Ramm, and Abraham have each encouraged us
to begin the account of inspiration in the third category. They have thereby
shifted our attention to that aspect of inspiration which has the greatest con-
ceptual potential precisely because it is one with which we are more familiar.
Strong reminded us that theology is ultimately grounded in faith, which
is certitude that cannot be exhaustively verified but is not thereby illicit.
Ramm's work brought to light the similarity between inspiration and persua-
sion, a similarity which confirms our belief that biblical inspiration ought
not be seen as an ad hoc explanation of a unique activity. Finally, Abraham
specified the three aspects of the activity of inspiration and showed that it
is moot to discuss whether the Bible is inspired without first determining
whether and how the Christian community has been inspired by it.
Two comments will conclude my survey of inspiration theories and launch
an attempt at one. The first comment makes clear what has until this point
only been implicit. In challenging the adequacy and coherence of theories of
inspiration which assume that inspiration is located in the words of the Bible
rather than in the lives of believers, we are challenging the meaning of the
concept of inspiration as that meaning has been understood in most of Jewish
and Christian tradition. That is, the confession that the Bible is inspired has
traditionally been taken to mean that the uniqueness of the Bible could be
entirely explained by examining the Bible itself rather than by examining the
Inductivist Theories of Biblical Inspiration 71
effect that it mediates to the believing community. Thus far in this book,
I have questioned the adequacy of this traditional explanation. In so doing,
I recognize the significance of my critical endeavor; I have called to task
nearly every theologian, evangelical or not, who has thought and written
about biblical inspiration in the last several thousand years. Although no
defense may be able to overcome such hubris, it should at least be noted that
I am aware of the scope of my critique. At this stage in my argument, then,
not yet having begun to offer my own systematic reflections on inspiration,
I can only trust that the criticisms I have made will justify the need for a
significantly revised theory of biblical inspiration.
The second comment is that in making these criticisms, it is obvious
that there is a difference between one's account of inspiration and one's
experience of inspiration. And it seems equally obvious that these theories
served as adequate models of the experience of biblical inspiration which
many generations of evangelical Christians underwent, regardless of the
conceptual difficulties inhering in them. That is, something in these accounts
"rang true" in the lives of believers so that they were enabled to reflect
clearly and adequately upon their encounter with God in their encounter with
the Bible. Our next chapters will attempt to lay bare precisely what these
theories were intending to say about God, the Bible, and the experience of
God mediated by the Bible. Thus, the focus of critical activity will shift from
what was "said" to what was "meant."
3
Inspiration and the
Human Recipient
Interest in Methodology
No reader of evangelical theories of inspiration can fail to notice the careful
attention given to methodological issues. For each theologian treated in this
book, the consideration of form or manner of approach has been obvious. To
many persons, but perhaps especially to conservative Protestant Christians,
72
Inspiration and the Human Recipient 73
Basic Anthropology
The next two topics are closely related and in fact are distinguished only for
the sake of discussion. In the present section I shall summarize the anthro-
pology which I believe is characteristic of most evangelical analyses. In the
following section I shall consider "the doctrine of the mind," or the impli-
cations of evangelical anthropological discussions with specific reference to
the activity and passivity of the human mind in the matter of coming to know
God. In both sections it should be kept in mind that I am not attempting a
comprehensive survey of either topic. This study assumes that evangelicalism
is irreducibly transdenominational or pluralistic. There simply is no single
or unified anthropology to which all evangelicals in various denominations
would subscribe. My effort, therefore, will be to present an anthropology
with which many evangelicals would agree, not for the sake of evaluating
the presentation itself but rather for the sake of going "behind" it to uncover
its point or message. To borrow an analogy from Ludwig Wittgenstein, this
summary discussion of anthropology will serve as a ladder for gaining access
to the theological presuppositions of anthropology. Once we have gained
such access, we will occupy a more advantageous perspective from which to
suggest what a contemporary evangelical theory of biblical inspiration should
say about the theological status of human beings.
I believe that there are three subjects to which all evangelical anthropolo-
gies both refer and return: that persons are creatures of God, that persons
are created in the image of God, and that persons are selfish or rebellious
creatures who are ultimately incapable of renewing the fractured bond or
covenant between themselves and God.
To say that human beings are creatures of God does not distinctively
characterize them, for if this is true of any part of the universe, then it is true
of all parts of it. Nor is it consonant with only one cosmogony, as Charles
Hodge reminds us.8 Instead, it is ultimately a claim which situates human
76 Evangelical Theories of Biblical Inspiration
beings both vertically and horizontally. 9 Vertically, the claim asserts that no
anthropology is complete which omits consideration of the relation of persons
to God. Or, put more positively and more technically, talk of human beings
transcendentally includes talk of God as the Being with whom all persons
are constitutively related and on whom they always depend. !0 This claim is
transcendental in that, while it cannot be empirically tested or demonstrated,
its truth is taken by the Christian community (past and present) as a condition
of the possibility of meaningful discourse about persons and the universe.
Theologically, cosmogonic discussions are restricted only in that they must
allow for scientists and theologians to integrate the "how" of this relation
within the discussion; the only such discussion which is in principle inval-
id is the one which a priori excludes the validity of God language as a part
of it.
The claim that persons are creatures of God also affirms the horizontal sig-
nificance of persons in creation, namely, that to a great extent human beings
are one with the rest of creation. If the vertical relationship has traditionally
been overemphasized by evangelicals, this one has characteristically been
underemphasized. That "God made human beings out of the [same] dust of
the ground" as He made all other sentient beings not only affirms the mate-
rial significance of human life (as compared to all platonizing schemes which
denigrate the bodily and material), but additionally licenses in principle the
analogy between conscious and self-conscious beings 11 which has been the
basis of so much medical and anthropological progress in recent centuries. 12
Once again, the point of reflecting upon the horizontal implications of crea-
ture language for our purposes is to notice that the continuity of all sentient
life, regardless of whether that continuity is argued from evolutionary or
creationist bases, licenses what we have called the inductive approach to
inspiration. In principle, at least, all of life is latent with instances which
may serve analogously to exemplify the ways in which God inspires persons
to a certain vision of life by means of the Bible. And conversely, because
God is the creator of "all things visible and invisible," there is literally no
limit to what He may use to inspire or bring about that vision of life. William
Abraham is on good evangelical ground indeed when he illustrates biblical
inspiration with the analogy of teacher-student inspiration.
What distinguishes human beings from all other conscious beings in the
universe thus is not their status as creatures. Rather, it is their status as
creatures in the image of God. The precise meaning of imago Dei is much
debated, of course, but at root I would argue that it is the same as what
anthropologists and philosophers refer to when they speak of human beings
as self-conscious. To be self-conscious means not only that one knows but
also that one has the ability to reflect upon one's knowing. Thus, self-
consciousness is primarily a category of the mind in that it is an act of
Inspiration and the Human Recipient 77
rather that God initiates the healing of the fractured bond between Himself
and human beings.
A final point must be made concerning the specific relationship of anthro-
pology to inspiration. Persons are creatures in God's image; they constitu-
tively know the difference between truth and falsity at the very moment when
they rebelliously strive to affirm the false. But because this is a constitutive
knowledge, they also know the truth. Thus, the formal principle of Scrip-
ture also asserts that it is in the Bible that persons encounter the clearest
expression of the truth concerning themselves and God. But how could this
be so since those who wrote and compiled the Bible were rebels as well?
Apart from some variant of the discredited dictation theory, why should it
be assumed that what those persons wrote is any more transparent of the
character of God (i.e., religiously authoritative) than what any other person
may have written about Him?
My response to this question is that it is proper but typically misconstrued.
Responses to this question usually focus upon characteristics of the Bible
themselves as providing evidences of its divine authority. This study has
already surveyed several possible characteristics. But what seems more
promising as an avenue of response is the exploration of how persons have
actually been inspired to a new understanding of God by means of the Bible.
In that act (or, more properly, those acts) of inspiration, was their attention
drawn to God as the initiating agent, to the authors of the Bible as the means
of His initiating, or to the mere words of the Bible independent of their
saving effects in their lives? Evangelical Christianity has long insisted that
salvation (or healing) occurs when the bond between God and persons is
restored and that the authority of the biblical authors and the biblical words
lies solely in their witness to the sufficiency of God's actions to that end. 18
What is authoritative about the Bible is its indispensableness in serving as
the medium of God's initiation as witnessed to by persons who have been
inspired through it. Or, to say the same thing, "the inspiration of the Bible"
at root is an abbreviated confession that a community has been inspired to a
renewed bond with the God to whom the Bible bears witness and who uses
that biblical witness as His primary means of inspiring that community.
To return to the question at hand, then, on theological grounds it may be
seen that, strictly speaking, the character of the biblical author is irrelevant to
the understanding of biblical inspiration; surely such persons were rebellious
creatures, as our anthropology insists with respect to all persons. What is
relevant is that the present community of Christian believers has been inspired
to its understanding of God through, and not by, the biblical authors. That
they were sinners is a given. That their words as handed down to us in the
present are the words through which we are inspired to know God is also a
given. Those words are inspired first because they reflect upon the experience
Inspiration and the Human Recipient 81
words on the page in order to determine what the author is saying and,
more importantly, why the author is saying it. Thus, in the second stage
the reader must simultaneously juggle several kinds of critical standards: the
kind or genre of book, the author's expressed purpose (if any), the types
of characters in the book, the methodology or organization of the book, the
logical progression of the story line (or message) from beginning to end,
and so on. The critical activity here is more scientific or objective than in
the moment of transition simply because more people are involved. Authors
write to audiences, and those audiences over time have formulated rules or
standards for interpreting what they read. While neither the formulation nor
the application of such rules is an exact science, it is objective in that both
an author and an audience are involved; neither may afford to think that he
or she is the only legitimate subject of interpretive rules. The criticism of the
first moment is entirely constituted by the horizon of the concrete individual,
while the criticism of the second moment, at least in principle, reflects the
horizon of all humanity.
This stage, while not completely passive, is largely so. What is meant
by "passive" here is that the mind responds to, or is acted upon by, data
which it does not originate and over which it has little if any therapeutic
control. This is seen both by the fact that the mind stands under the words
and message of the author and also that it stands under the hermeneutical
(interpretive) rules worked out within the literary community in history. In
actually reading a book, therefore, a person is acted upon by several external
sources and criteria and to that degree is a passive agent.
However, he or she is not totally passive in this moment. The mind must
still consciously and deliberately activate the intention to stand under the
author's words. It must also choose certain criteria over others as it encounters
more and more chunks of material, so that, for example, a narrative work is
not confused with and misread as a historical work. On balance, though, the
reader is responsible to the greatest number of objective or external sources
in this moment of reading a book. This is the time when the author has
greatest access to the mind and life of the reader and is likewise the time
when the reader is most consciously open to the message of the author.
The third moment of mental activity in reading a book may be called
"appropriation." This moment is almost entirely critical and is thus actively
deliberative. It is the stage in which what the reader has encountered in the
book is filtered through the grid of his or her own horizon of expectations for
the purpose of determining its temporal practical effects for his or her life.
In simpler language, what occurs here is the actual acceptance or rejection
of various aspects of the book's perceived message. The perceived message
may or may not be coincident with the author's intended message but, strictly
speaking, this is irrelevant to the reader.25 Once the reader has moved from
84 Evangelical Theories of Biblical Inspiration
the second moment to the third, a transition which may occur many times in
the course of a single book, the reader has surrounded the author's message
and made it his or her own. 26 Simultaneously, the reader evaluates that
message with respect to its fit or appropriateness for his or her life.
There are two levels of evaluation which can occur within this moment.
Of these, the latter is of greater interest to our theory of inspiration. At the
first level of evaluation, the reader's horizon of expectations is brought to
bear upon the message of the book in such a way as to determine how well it
may fit within that horizon. Usually, therefore, the reader's life is modified
only slightly at this level. If, for example, the reader has already accepted
the eighth commandment ("You shall not steal") as his or her own, then it is
unlikely that reading a newly revised set of textual copyright regulations will
significantly modify his or her activity, since copyright laws are a specific
application of this commandment to the publishing field. A given copyright
regulation may be new to the reader, but it will still fit within his or her
horizon of expectations which already proscribe theft.
At the second level of evaluation, though, the situation is reversed. Here
it is more the case that the message of the book is brought to bear upon
the reader's horizon of expectations. The grid itself is evaluated, and if
a change of the grid or horizon is deemed appropriate, then larger and
potentially major areas of the person's life will likewise be affected. Think,
for instance, of a husband who has grown up accepting the surface meaning
of Pauline injunctions concerning "male headship" in families. If this person
then reflects upon what many have called the sexism of such injunctions for
the present and changes his concept of the marriage so that it incorporates a
greater parity between husband and wife, then it is clearly the case that his
horizon has been restructured and that his future activity will correspondingly
be altered.
It is essential to notice at both of these levels of evaluation that change is
introduced not capriciously but rather with respect to a previously accepted
criterion. At the first level, this criterion is straightforwardly located within
the horizon of expectations. At the second level, it is still located within
the horizon but at a different place from that subset of expectations which is
being re-evaluated.27 The second level of evaluation is especially interesting
for a theory of inspiration because the critical priority of various subsets
of that horizon is rearranged, so that what was previously less dominant
but nonetheless present is now taken to be more dominant. In the example
above, the parity of husband and wife, while probably accepted by the
husband in some areas, is not taken to be the dominant model of marriage
before the completion of the second level of evaluation. What is taken to be
dominant is the male headship (or hierarchical) model. After the second level
of evaluation, however, the hierarchical model is dominated by the parity
Inspiration and the Human Recipient 85
model, even though some aspects of hierarchy may remain. The significance
of noticing this with respect to inspiration is that the rearrangement of one's
expectations is triggered or initiated by something external to the reader's
expectations but still consonant with them. The husband has been inspired to
see the former relationship in a new light. 28 Whereas the parity model was
previously operative only to a minor degree, but was still present within the
husband's horizon, he now sees it as the primary marital model by virtue of
an illumination from within his horizon of expectations, and he changes his
actions accordingly.
It was said earlier that "biblical inspiration" refers to the transition from
apprehending the biblical message to apprehending it as divine initiation in
salvation, that is, as God's message. But how, in the instance we have been
exploring, is the transition made to the new model of marriage being a part
of God's message to the husband? It is relatively easy to trace the bare
operation of inspiration here, for much the same analysis could be applied
to this case as was applied earlier to the case of teacher-student inspiration
offered by Abraham. But Abraham's account failed to analyze the specific
question of God's participation in the process of inspiration, and I criticized
him precisely on that score. Thus, we need to address that question ourselves:
how is it possible to account for the evangelical's insistence that "biblical
inspiration" is in the final analysis the inspiration of persons by God?
My response to this question builds directly upon the anthropology outlined
in this section and the previous one. If all of reality is God's creation, then
He may use any part of it to reveal Himself to persons. If, in addition,
human beings are created in God's image, then they constitutively know the
truth about God even when, as rebels, they seek to repress that truth. What is
essential to grasp, though, is that it is analytic to the concept of human beings
that they know God. In the instance of the husband whose understanding of
marriage is rearranged by reflecting upon certain biblical texts, then it is
proper to say that his new understanding is inspired by God to the extent that
it is consonant with what he constitutively knows about God. That is, his
new understanding is more closely aligned with his knowledge of God than
was his older understanding. The specific reason why we may say that this
is inspiration by God is not just that he now has a better model of marriage
with which to operate, but more importantly because the new model more
accurately illustrates and clarifies his understanding of God for him. This is
the crux of our theory of biblical inspiration. Biblical inspiration involves
a person's learning more about himself or herself from reading the Bible
and in the process coming to know more about God. Because knowledge
of God is constitutive, however, persons cannot learn about God except
ultimately by learning from God.29 If the husband did not have a clearer
understanding of God as a result of his new understanding of marriage gained
86 Evangelical Theories of Biblical Inspiration
from reflecting upon the Bible, there would be no reason to say that he had
been biblically inspired. But if he has come to know God better as a result
of this rearrangement, then it is both proper and unavoidable to say that God
inspired it within him.
This section had two purposes. The first was to explain how the mind
operates in the reading of any book, including but not limited to the Bible.
I asserted that there are three moments of mental activity in this enterprise.
Furthermore, I advanced the hypothesis that, while inspiration of necessity
includes all three moments, it is most clearly seen in the final moment of
appropriation, because this is the "time" when a person actively accepts the
book's perceived message as his or her own message. My second purpose
was to account for how some acts of inspiration could legitimately be called
acts of divine inspiration. With respect to this question, I concluded that an
act of inspiration is "divine" when a person comes to know God better as
a result of a change in his or her horizon of expectations. "To know God
better" assumes a prior (but less clear) knowledge of God, which is exactly
what our anthropology asserts with respect to all human beings. All persons
constitutively know God, and thus cannot learn about Him except ultimately
by learning from Him.
Conclusion
This chapter has considered the matter of theological anthropology. It was
argued that a Christian anthropology always takes human beings as dependent
upon God, whether with respect to human existence in general or to thinking
and moral acts in particular. Thus, in principle, all acts of knowing are acts
inspired by God. Such acts are conclusions to the process of choosing, and
this is the process at stake in the doctrine of humans being made in the image
of God. When acts of knowing result in a greater understanding of both the
world and of God, then it is proper to say that a person has been divinely
inspired. The next chapter will focus on the middle term of the concept of
biblical inspiration, the Bible.
4
Inspiration and the Means
87
88 Evangelical Theories of Biblical Inspiration
then the certainty of communicating that intention from God to the human
community must exceed anything which that community itself is capable
of generating. The doctrine of verbal inspiration thus insists that both the
meaning of Scripture and the words which bear that meaning were chosen
by God precisely because of the need for salvation on the one hand and the
human inability to contribute to it on the other.
The roots of this explanation of the origin of religious certainty extend
to that theory of knowledge which philosophers call foundationalism and
which we have already encountered in Chapter 1 under the names of naive
inductivism and Scottish realism.2 At root, these philosophical alternatives
attempt to account for the certainty of scientific knowledge which was taken
by nearly all persons to constitute the difference between pre- and post-
Enlightenment theories of knowledge. What accounted for the increase of
certainty among the latter class of theories was precisely their empirical
foundation upon those things taken as undeniable "facts." Certainty was
thus ultimately embedded in fact, in what could not be denied without
dispensing with certainty altogether. Or, to say the same thing, the certainty
of knowledge was taken to be embedded in the psychological need for
knowledge to be certain in order for it to count as knowledge. Whatever was
taken as objective "fact," therefore, was precisely correlative to whatever it
was that accounted for the human need for knowledge to be certain.
For evangelicals, there was little question of what among all of the various
alternatives could stand as "fact": the Bible. More precisely, it was what
actually constituted the Bible, the words which comprised it as a book. There
was nothing more fundamental than the words of the Bible in which the
certainty requisite for human salvation could be located—not their present
meaning, the author's intentions, their meaning as understood by the original
believing audience, or their meaning as determined by lexical usage in the
primitive world. The validity of each of these alternatives was taken to rest
upon the biblical word, and thus only that word was sufficient as the locus
or holder of religious certainty.
The second reason why evangelicals insist that inspiration is verbal is
closely related to the first. It is consistently referred to by evangelicals as
the fear of subjectivism. Stated simply, subjectivism is the presumption
of the autonomy of the human subject, and thus is a precise denial of
the anthropology summarized above. Evangelicals resisted subjectivism in
principle because the autonomous human subject is a completely inadequate
locus of certainty regarding God and human salvation. What we called the
evangelical anthropology asserts that persons are entirely the object of the
divine initiative. With respect to matters divine, human beings learn about
God by learning from Him. The alternative possibility, that persons could
90 Evangelical Theories of Biblical Inspiration
initiate matters with respect both to salvation and to the certainty of the
knowledge of salvation, was taken by evangelicals not just as wrong but as
constituting the grossest sort of rebelliousness against God.
What may we learn from the insistence upon biblical inspiration as a
property of the words of the Bible per se? Primarily, it seems, we must
appreciate the point that inspiration is not self-generated. This is an analytic
truth, of course, and thus it is seemingly obvious. 3 As I have often noted,
the concept of inspiration requires at least two mentally active agents and a
medium. Apart from this structure, and apart from the initiating activity of
one agent by means of the medium and the receiving activity of the other by
means of the same medium, there can be no concept of inspiration. 4
The evangelicals were not just making a conceptual point, however. In the
larger context from which most evangelical theories of inspiration sprang,
a context which looked with great suspicion upon any alleged act of God
in the world and upon any theory of moral anthropology which retained
vestiges of the debilitating effects of sin, evangelical theories of biblical
inspiration struggled to retain the traditional Christian structure of the God-
human relationship. The redefinition of this bond within post-Enlightenment
Protestantism was taken by evangelicals to be a fatal redefinition because
in their eyes it reversed the roles of the initiating and receiving agents. But,
since the "new" initiating agent was precisely the person who stood in need of
what he or she was now said to initiate, human salvation became impossible.
The Bible became more a commentary on salvation than the primary means
of it.
In insisting upon the traditional structure of the God-human relationship
according to which God, not persons, prompts the activity of salvation,
evangelicals reminded the Christian community that knowledge of God must
ultimately be seen as knowledge from God if it is to be a saving knowledge.
That is, knowledge of the divine originates outside humans. This is the most
significant conclusion, I believe, to be drawn from discussions concerning
the verbal inspiration of the Bible.
Unfortunately, discussions of verbal inspiration have generally tended to
confuse this point in the very attempt to make it. By making the locus of
certainty the biblical word itself rather than the actual experience of salvation
by means of that word, evangelicals committed two errors. The first is that
they took certainty as a property of words rather than as a property of the
mind. But that is not how certainty operates. The mind accepts a given
set of words as certain when it sees a correspondence between them and
concrete actuality. Logically, experience always precedes the reflection upon
experience by words. Were the situation otherwise, there could be no criteria
by which to distinguish between true and false statements and observations.
In referring to certainty as a property of the biblical words, it is clear
Inspiration and the Means 91
that the evangelicals' goal was to affirm the normative status of the Bible
over other categories of religious data. I agree with this goal, but I cannot
agree with the tactic which confuses the object to which certainty attaches.
Certainty is the conclusion of a judgment, and judgments are acts of human
minds rather than properties of objects such as words. Said differently,
certainty results from mental judgments, and such judgments are themselves
the results of comparisons which the mind makes over several primary data of
experience. A certain judgment is one which chooses a given explanation or
theory as correct as over against others in accounting for concrete actuality as
the person or community experiences it. With respect to the Bible, therefore,
certainty results from the mental determination which chooses the biblical
accounts of redemption and salvation as those which best summarize the
actual experience of salvation undergone by Christian believers. As such, it
properly calls attention to the mediatorial or sacramental status of the Bible
because it refers to that act of the mind which grasps the Biblical accounts
of salvation as those which best convey the intention of God toward the
believing community and ultimately toward the entire world.
The second confusion which characteristically arises from evangelical dis-
cussions concerning verbal inspiration is that they are dictation theories in
all but name. In spite of the vehemence with which this point is denied,
it is impossible to construct a theory of the unique and divine status of a
given set of words (i. e., those comprising the Bible) without simultaneously
constructing a theory of dictation. Once it is assumed that human moral fal-
libility is unable to be utilized by God as a vehicle of divine inspiration, and
it is instead assumed that the doctrines of biblical certainty and perspicuity
require the overriding of fallible contributions to Scripture, then some form
of dictation is present. I am not alone in noticing this, of course, and do
not wish to belabor the point. For the moment, I shall simply note that
evangelicals failed to take seriously the mediatorial status of the Bible and
instead operated as though it were the divine terminus of the divine-human
encounter. I shall further inspect this misconception in the section dealing
with inerrancy below.
We have now accomplished our first real interpretive work. We accepted
a formal element within characteristically evangelical theories of biblical
inspiration but suggested a somewhat different material significance for it.
I suggested that the point of talk of the verbal inspiration of the Bible is to
remind the believing audience that humans always respond to God and do so
especially in the matter of the divine salvation to which the Bible witnesses.
Salvation is not self-generated and thus its inspiration within persons is
not either. We denied, however, that the doctrine of verbal inspiration has
anything to do with empirical properties which the biblical words, unlike
all other words in the world, possess per se. Were that the case, then one
92 Evangelical Theories of Biblical Inspiration
would have to accept the divine status of those words before understanding
them; one would have to be saved in order to become saved. Our theory
of inspiration intends to be more faithful to the nature of experience by
emphasizing that experience always precedes reflection. In particular, this
means that those who refer to the Bible as verbally inspired have already
experienced divine salvation in ways which are consonant with the ways
summarized and presented in it.
the Bible should be taken to refer to the range of outlooks within the
human community, each of which is able to articulate its own experience
of salvation with direct reference to stories and images contained within the
Bible.
An example from the New Testament will serve to illustrate this latter
assertion. It has only been within the relatively recent past that biblical
scholars have recognized that the titles used for Jesus in the New Testament
were confessional or credal in nature rather than ontological. That is, titles
such as "Messiah" "Son of Man," "Lord," and so on9 are indications of the
significance of the faith which the communities that used them had in Jesus
rather than abstract descriptions of who Jesus was in himself or per se. Thus,
we would expect to find the title "Messiah" used by Jewish Christians because
the term already had a religious meaning within Judaism which it did not
have, for example, for converts in Greece and Italy. As James Dunn notes
in his discussion of the title, however, Jesus himself seems to have resisted
the usefulness of "Messiah" precisely because of the nationalist and political
connotations it had while he was alive. 10 Clearly, then, "Messiah" (and its
Greek translation "Christ") acquired specific Christian significance from its
usefulness to the Jewish Christian community rather than from its usage
by Jesus. This community advanced or enriched the meaning of "Messiah"
so that it came to refer to the humble person whose suffering and death
signaled divine vindication, over the earlier narrower meaning according to
which suffering and death were taken as indications of God's disapproval and
rejection (which is the meaning that Jesus rejected). The Jewish Christians
accomplished this development by linking together what had previously been
unconnected: contribution to the Kingdom of God by the glorious messiah
on the one hand and the suffering, humiliation, and death of the suffering
servant of Isaiah 53 on the other. Because Jesus was the focus of their worship
and thus stood fully vindicated before God in their eyes, they felt licensed
in developing the notion of messiahship to include what was foolishness to
non-Christian Jews: a crucified messiah.11
On the other hand, a large number of early Christians existed for whom
the phrase "Jesus is the Messiah" did not serve as the primary confession.
This appears to be true of, among others, Hellenistic Jewish Christians,
that is, Palestinian Jews whose predominant culture was Greek rather than
Hebrew and who became Christian converts as adults. For this community,
"Messiah" had to be supplemented in order to express what was for them the
highest possible religious affirmation; by itself "Messiah" did not adequately
summarize their faith in the risen Jesus as it had for the former community.
The most common supplement given to "Messiah" within this community
was "Son of God." There is evidence of this supplementation in Peter's
great confession in Matthew 16:16, where Matthew explains Mark's terse
Inspiration and the Means 95
"You are the Christ" (Mark 8:29) by adding the phrase " . . . the Son of
the living God." John reflects the same need to explain "Messiah" when
he announces the reason for writing his Gospel (John 20:31): " . . . these
things are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of
God. . . . " While these two examples do not at all exhaust the total number
available in the New Testament, they do serve to indicate how confessional
statements were tailored to reflect the existing religious character of the
community whose faith they were intended to express. Hellenistic Jewish
Christians could scarcely be expected to represent their faith adequately by
means of credal statements which were not natively their own.
This example is helpful, I believe, because it illustrates how different
cultures utilized different confessions to summarize their common faith in
the risen Jesus. In addition, however, and perhaps just as important for the
purposes of this study, it illustrates the actual practice of biblical inspiration at
work among a variety of Christian groups in the first century. Both "Messiah"
and "Son of God" are Old Testament images. That is, both were biblical
images to the Jew of the first century. Both "Hebrew" and "Hellenistic" Jews
felt the need to refer to their experience of salvation in Jesus by means of
images which were relevantly distinct from each other but were nonetheless
commonly drawn from their Bible. In the one case, "Messiah" provided
a sufficient category by which to affirm the divine significance of Jesus,
provided that the concept be consonant with (i.e., inspired by) the image
of the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 rather than the image of the conquering
political hero. In the other case, "Messiah" was only tangentially helpful and
had to be supplemented by the image of "Son of God" drawn from Psalms 2:7
("He said to me, 'You are my son, today I have begotten you.'") and from 2
Samuel 7:14 ("I will be his father, and he will be my son."), both of which
corresponded to Jesus's use of abba in reference to God. In both instances,
we see at work in the Bible what this study takes as being present within
all specific acts of biblical inspiration: a community's understanding of God
enhanced by the creative interaction of an existing authoritative document
with the present needs of a given people. And in both instances we see this
creative interaction occurring only after the experience of salvation by Jesus;
it is only in the light of that reality that either type of Jewish Christian looked
to the Bible as source of images by which to summarize their faith and to
communicate it to others.
If we understand plenary inspiration in the ways just presented, that is, as a
reflection on the process by which a variety of Christian groups validates the
Christianness of their experiences of salvation by means of images drawn
from the Bible which are meaningful to their particular group, then we
have at the same time provided a theological warrant for evangelicalism's
pluralistic or transdenominational character. I do not intend to commend
96 Evangelical Theories of Biblical Inspiration
church as from those outside of it. 12 The task of this chapter is not to retrace
the route of this process of constriction. Rather, it is to consider whether the
notion of inerrancy has any continuing usefulness to the doctrine of biblical
inspiration, especially that understanding of inspiration being developed in
this study. I shall discuss briefly the meaning of inerrancy and the primary
reason why I believe it has occupied such a prominent position in Christian
reflections upon the significance of the Bible. I shall then turn to Donatism,
an intense controversy in the early church whose "orthodox" resolution will
help in determining whether or not the notion of error has any theological
relevance to the saving operation of God in the world. I shall conclude that
it does not and therefore that the notion of the inerrancy of the Bible should
be dropped as a constituent of the doctrine of biblical inspiration.
The idea or notion of inerrancy is very simple. Harold Lindsell describes
it for us:
Inspiration may be defined as the inward work of the Holy Spirit in the hearts
and minds of chosen men who then wrote the Scriptures so that God got written
what He wanted. The Bible in all of its parts constitutes the written Word of
God to man. This Word is free from all error in its original autographs. . . . It
is wholly trustworthy in matters of history and doctrine. . . . [The] authors of
Scripture, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, were preserved from making
factual, historical, scientific, or other errors. The Bible does not purport to be a
textbook of history, science, or mathematics; yet when the writers of Scripture
spoke of matters embraced in these disciplines, they did not indite error; they
wrote what was true. . . . Inspiration involved infallibility from start to finish.
God the Holy Spirit by nature cannot lie or be the author of untruth. If the
Scripture is inspired at all, it must be infallible. If any part of it is not infallible,
then that part cannot be inspired. If inspiration allows for the possibility of error
14
then inspiration ceases to be inspiration.
A summary would be that the Bible is free from all errors because it is God's
Word and God cannot lie. There are three conceptual difficulties rooted in this
position. Taken together with Donatism, these objections render inerrancy
obsolete as a topic of interest to the inspiration of the Bible.
The first difficulty with the traditional inerrancy position is that it is not at
all consonant with the concept of inspiration. I have argued repeatedly here
that any act of inspiration involves at least two mentally active agents and a
medium, or means, through which the receiving agent is indirectly changed
by the initiating agent. As Lindsell makes clear, however, the inerrancy
position rearranges these factors so that only the biblical author receives
inspiration, which then results in the writing of books. Thus, the operation
of inspiration occurs exclusively to the biblical author, but never since then.
That is, only the biblical authors were religiously inspired in the sense of
coming to understand more about God, and this not from reflection upon their
98 Evangelical Theories of Biblical Inspiration
useful and authoritative for inerrantists, why perpetuate the abstract argument
for the inerrancy of irretrievable autographs? The only reason would seem
to be to safeguard the doctrine of the truthfulness of God, an instinct which
is proper but which concerns the doctrine of God rather than the doctrine
of Scripture and thus, strictly speaking, is off the subject. If the purpose
of theology is to reflect upon the actual experience of believers, then that
reflection must consider all that the believer experiences.19
The final topic to consider in our assessment of inerrancy is the Donatist
schism of the fourth- and fifth-century African church. Although Donatism
was primarily an ecclesiastical controversy, we shall explore it to mine its
lessons for the present controversy concerning the "purity" of the Bible.
By the beginning of the fourth century, the Catholic faith had taken firm
hold in most of North Africa. Before Constantine, though, who became
Roman emperor in 306 and legalized Christianity in 313, sporadic persecu-
tions continued to plague African Christians. In particular, they were still
reeling from "the last, the Great, Persecution of Diocletian, in 303-305."20
Like all religious persecutions, this one brought to the surface the question of
the relationship between church and culture because of the need to deal with
those believers who had capitulated to and complied with the persecutors in
order to avoid imprisonment and death.
This question was especially acute with respect to bishops who had surren-
dered copies of Scripture to the Romans. The actual proximate cause of the
Donatist schism involved Bishop Mensurius of Carthage, who had handed
over heretical documents to the unsuspecting Romans under the pretense that
those documents were Scripture. For this act, he was accused of traditio.
Although Mensurius died before any official action could be taken in his
case, the horns of the Donatist dilemma were set. On the one hand were the
"rigorists," who argued that traditores had forfeited all rights to ecclesiasti-
cal leadership, especially the right of ordaining priests and bishops. On the
other hand were the "liberals," who maintained that proper penance absolved
sinners from all errors of action and thus that traditio did not preclude the
possibility of subsequent leadership in the church. 21 The rigorist party at
Carthage quickly deposed Mensurius's successor and ordained first Majori-
nus and then Donatus, for whom the schism is named, in his place. The
Donatists practiced widespread rebaptism and reordination since they held
all Catholics to be outside the true church. Augustine, priest at Carthage and
later bishop of Hippo, undertook the defense of the Catholic position.
Theologically, the Donatists separated from the Catholic faith over the
question of whether a person could properly mediate divine forgiveness if he
or she had committed an offense which was publicly known. 22 In response
to this, Augustine first drew attention to the unwarranted restriction by the
Donatists of "impurity of life" to the offense of traditio. That is, in insist-
Inspiration and the Means 101
ing that the sin of traditio disqualified a person both from administering the
sacraments and from ordaining priests and bishops, the Donatists ignored
even more heinous offenses committed by their own defenders against the
Catholics, including theft, arson, suicide, and murder. 23 Thus, their schis-
matic tendencies were demonstrated by seizing upon one legitimate doctrine
within Christian thought and practice to the exclusion of others, especially
the principle of ethical consistency (Matthew 7:12).
More obviously still, Donatist sectarianism is discerned in the corollary
of the doctrine of purity, namely, that genuine Christian faith was to be
found only in those persons who had successfully resisted handing over the
seditious material to the emperor's soldiers. What this implied in turn was
that the true church was objectively sinless and restricted to North Africa,
since only there was apostolic authority untainted by traditio.24 Augustine
rejected this corollary too, stating that the true church is found wherever
the sacraments are properly received and not, as the Donatists averred, only
where they are properly administered.25 It is this line of defense which is of
most interest to a consideration of inerrancy.
The Donatists claimed that traditio placed one outside the true church,
from where it was impossible properly to administer the sacraments. The
theological warrant for this position was that priestly holiness or sanctity was
essential to the communication of the intention of the sacrament (forgiveness
and salvation) from God to the human recipient. In more contemporary lan-
guage, they believed that there were three moments or aspects to a proper
sacramental act: the divine intention, the public sanctity of the human medi-
ator, and the willingness of the recipient. The Donatists claimed Cyprian
as their authority. In the previous century and also in a period following
persecution, he had insisted that bishops and priests be members of the true
church in order for their official acts to be effective.26 Willis points out,
though, that the Donatists actually altered Cyprian's dictum in ignoring his
assumption that "a bishop was not really conceivable apart from his church
and people."27 For Cyprian, as for most of the primitive church, priestly and
episcopal authority was not inherent but was rather delegated by the congre-
gation, the ultimate human seat of religious authority.28 The Donatists (again)
restricted the meaning of priestly and episcopal membership in the true church
so that it referred solely to the public character of the sacramental minister.
In so doing, they gratuitously elevated the second of the three aspects of a
sacramental act and made the third aspect entirely dependent upon it. In other
words, the reception of the divine offer of salvation was entirely relative to
the personal holiness of the priest; his character was essential, rather than
instrumental or mediatorial, to the efficacy of the sacrament.
In attempting theologically to overcome the schism introduced by the
Donatists, Augustine faced the delicate task of at once affirming their sec-
102 Evangelical Theories of Biblical Inspiration
tarianism and welcoming them back into the Catholic church without rebap-
tizing their laity and reordaining their clergy, a move which would have
underscored the legitimacy of the original division.
The via media he took was to distinguish between a sacrament itself and the
use or validity of it, and thus between the communio sacramentorum and the
communio sanctorum. Sacraments may be administered anywhere, he said,
including outside a true church where are located both heretics and pagans
(i.e., those who hold to false Christian beliefs and those who hold to no
Christian beliefs). In the case of the administration of the sacraments to such
persons, it is clear that the personal holiness of the minister has no relevance
at all to the invalidity of such sacramental acts; it is the recipient whose
presumed self-sufficiency precludes the reception of God's forgiveness and
salvation. By the same token, then, the validity or benefit of a sacramental
act also has to do with the openness of the recipient to God's forgiveness
and to living a life of charity or tangible gratitude to God. In this way, the
Donatists were seen to be schismatics, but since it was their intention in
receiving baptism, communion, and ordination to be faithful to the triune
God proclaimed by all of their sacramental liturgies, nothing further was
required for their (re)admission to the Catholic church than the expressed
intention to live charitably in the one, holy, and apostolic church.
The significance of Augustine's solution for the present controversy is
clear. Formally, there is a similarity in that both inerrantists and Donatists
restrict themselves to a single element within the entire corpus of Christian
doctrines to evaluate the appropriateness of the beliefs of others. As we have
seen, such an evaluation does not square with the practice of the first-century
Christian communities, whose ultimate criterion for evaluating Christianness
was experiential rather than intellectual.
More importantly, however, the Donatist controversy stands as a witness
against allowing any mediating element to overwhelm and thus block the
divine intention of human salvation, whether that element be bishop or book.
No mediating element need possess empirically divine characteristics in order
to be constituted as a mediating element, as is clear from the preceding
consideration of the doctrine of God as creator. More to the point for our
purposes, no reflection upon Christian experience can fail to notice that it
is present copies of the Bible, which all parties admit to contain errors and
difficulties, which constitute the Scripture that inspires and guides the church
and its members today. Theology is a reflection upon existing faith, including
but not limited to one's own, and it is therefore incoherent to hold that faith
is impossible where errant mediators exist. Paradoxically, it is the presence
of faith in those who insist most strongly upon inerrancy that is the greatest
testimony against inerrancy.
Inspiration and the Means 103
In this section I have argued that the major warrant for the inerrancy
position depends on a confusion between the doctrine of God and the doctrine
of Scripture. The failure to distinguish carefully between them led historically
to the attribution to the latter of a characteristic (intrinsic errorlessness)
that properly belongs only to God. Furthermore, this confusion tended to
give the written mediator of the God-human relationship priority over that
relationship itself, which is, to say the least, contrary to sound theology.
Finally, a historical analogy was discovered in Donatism which warns us
against seeking perfection of any earthly instrument which God may use to
enhance our knowledge and love of Him. The doctrine of God as creator
means that everything God uses as means to inspire salvation is not God,
and thus cannot be invested with characteristics which only God properly
possesses. ?Q
Conclusion
In this chapter I have presented an outline of a theory of biblical inspiration
which I believe is faithful to the evangelical tradition and yet is, at times,
a deliberate development of that tradition. If there is a single way to char-
acterize this theory, it is that the phrase "biblical inspiration" refers to the
enhancement of one's understanding of God brought about instrumentally
through the Bible, rather than to the mysterious and nonrepeatable process
by which "God got written what He wanted" in the Bible. In other words,
"the inspiration of the Bible" refers to the enhancement which the Bible
instrumentally causes in persons and not to the Bible itself as the terminus
or locus of that enhancement. In grammatical terms, my theory views "the
inspiration of the Bible" as a subjective genitive rather than as an objec-
tive genitive. This means that the uniqueness of the Bible for Christian life
and theology is rooted not in its inspiration, but rather in that to which it
inspires us, namely, a greater understanding and awareness of, and fidelity
to, the threefold God to whom the Bible bears witness. This realization in
turn invites the Christian community to reflect more fully upon any and all
experiences of inspiration as analogies by which it may better understand the
inspiration which the Bible mediates. I have already touched upon this task
in the section concerning the activity of the mind.
The final chapter of this book deals with God, the initiator of salvation.
Here we shall explore the question of how the human mind receives inspi-
ration from God and how it may be certain that that inspiration is from
God. The discussion of this matter will conclude our consideration of the
three aspects of biblical inspiration which William Abraham brought to our
attention.
5
God as the Initiator
of Inspiration
Thus far we have addressed ourselves to two of the three elements involved
in the concept of biblical inspiration. We have seen that inspiration is a
mediated enhancement of one's mind (or, more generally, one's life) which
is not self-generated. Biblical inspiration, then, is inspiration which results
in an enhanced understanding of God that conforms to what is said of God
in the Bible. Because one cannot learn about God except by learning from
Him, we may also conclude that biblical inspiration is initiated by God.
Chapter 4 discussed three topics which characterize what evangelicals
have traditionally believed about the Bible as the means of inspiration.
The topics were reworked so that they would be more understandable yet
still conform to the characteristic norms of evangelicalism, especially the
so-called formal and material principles of Protestantism. On those bases
certain interpretations of verbal and plenary inspiration were proposed, and
in addition we saw good reason to drop the doctrine of biblical inerrancy
altogether.
In this chapter we turn to the final element in the concept of biblical
inspiration: God, the initiating agent. Here I shall try to do two things. I shall
first outline a theology proper (that is, a doctrine of God) which I propose
as an adequate ground of our understanding of divine inspiration. Here I
shall be helped especially by Karl Rahner, a Catholic theologian who has
contributed much to an understanding of the ways in which God and human
beings are related. I shall take from Rahner only that which contributes
directly to the concept of God in order to see how God is present in the
"enhancing toward salvation" of biblical inspiration. Next, I will suggest four
criteria for relating divine inspiration and biblical inspiration. These criteria
will constitute my final proposal for identifying biblical inspiration within
the evangelical community.
104
God as the Initiator of Inspiration 105
asking of questions affirms the notion of finitude, while the unceasing asking
of questions affirms the notion of unceasing finitude.
It may now be said that openness to the "ever-receding horizon" of pos-
sibilities which is the storehouse from which answers are received means
that human beings are in fact open to the infinite. Only the possibility of
the infinite can account for the observation that finite humans continue to
ask questions and receive answers to them without thereby ceasing to be
finite humans. As the infinite horizon of possibilities yields answers to the
questions people ask, it remains present only as the infinite horizon. By
asking questions, persons intend to understand more of this horizon but find
that as they do so, it steadily recedes from them. As unrestricted infinite,
the horizon is eternally beyond their finitude, ever yielding answers to their
questions but never within their grasp.
Rsrsons may be said to transcend the limitations of their existence at a given
moment whenever they accept or recognize an answer to a question they have
asked. They do not completely transcend such limitations, of course, since,
as we have just seen, answered questions give rise to further unanswered
ones. But they do transcend those now former limitations by small increments
whenever they are no longer bound by the particular restrictions which called
forth the question in the first place. The phenomenon of transcendence thus
has to do (from the human side) with the self-surpassing nature of knowledge
by which persons come to an enhanced understanding of the world by means
of answers which come from outside themselves.
We now need to account for the presence and activity of God in this process
of enhancement. We shall do this by reflecting upon what it means for a
question to be answered. How, that is, is the very ordinary event of answering
questions an exemplification of divine activity and divine inspiration?
Thus far we have said that asking questions signals human openness to the
infinite as the storehouse of possibilities from which answers are received.
Another way to say this is that while there are several possible responses to
a given question, only one will be accepted as the satisfactory answer by the
questioner.5 But what is the criterion or yardstick by which that response is
chosen as right over other responses, and, more importantly, where is God
in all of this?
The most characteristic way of describing the process by which persons
select answers from among all possible responses involves noticing that
answers are typically chosen when they are seen to be "good." That is,
an answer arises from the set of all possible responses when it, more than
they, satisfies the notion of goodness which is most appropriate to the context
of the question asked by the questioner. Thus, before any specific act of
choosing is the concept of goodness which is present to the questioner even
if he or she has never consciously thought about it.
108 Evangelical Theories of Biblical Inspiration
as those acts fulfill the need for knowledge to be good or acceptable to the
knowing mind, they are ultimately grounded in and thus initiated by God.
It may be objected that this understanding of divine inspiration is unhelp-
ful precisely because all acts of human understanding are seen as divinely
inspired. Here I can do no better than cite and defend Rahner's response
to the same objection: "Why, then, may this not be the case?"10 That is,
for those persons who insist that God is not simply another entity in the
universe, divine activity must be explained carefully so that it is relevantly
distinct from the activity of mundane actors and yet remains appropriate to
a doctrine of God. Ever since Thomas Aquinas, this has been accomplished
by means of the doctrine of secondary causation, a doctrine summarized by
Rahner when he says that
the chain of causality has its basis in [God, although it is not the case] that
by his activity he inserts himself as a link in this chain of causes as one
cause among them. The chain itself as a whole, and hence the world in its
interconnectedness, . . . is the self-revelation of its ground. And he himself is
not to be found within this totality as such. For the ground does not appear
within what is grounded if it is really the radical and hence the divine ground,
and is not [merely] a function in a network of functions. 11
The understanding of divine inspiration just presented occupies the same
via media in that it accounts for the presence and character of God as the
ground of the possibility of all knowing acts (and not just some of them,
which would be an inappropriate restriction upon divine activity) but yet does
not make God a direct or empirical participant in any knowing act. Thus,
analogous to what was said earlier about God and goodness, one can never
say "God taught me something" and mean the same thing as "Jones taught
me something. " Rather, God's participation in acts of knowledge is always
a mediated participation; it is always possible to come to know something
and not recognize God's participation in the process. By the same token, it is
not only possible but is in fact necessary for faith to be able to see all acts of
understanding as grounded in the character of God. In all knowing acts, it is
appropriate to recognize and be thankful to God as the indirect and ultimate
initiator of understanding. This is what is meant by divine inspiration.
and worship as the Father of Jesus. The normative aspect of Christian biblical
inspiration thus authorizes certain ways of thinking about salvation, declaring
them to be constitutive of the ways God is recognized to have worked in the
past and of the ways He may be trusted to work in the present and future.
The fourth and fullest statement relating biblical inspiration to divine inspi-
ration is that biblical inspiration is normative and foundational divine inspira-
tion with respect to human salvation. Whereas the previous aspect of biblical
inspiration proposed that certain reflections on salvation are normative for the
Christian understanding of salvation, this one provides a limit to such author-
ized accounts of salvation. The limiting factor is essentially chronological in
nature: how did the earliest generations of Christian believers experience and
understand salvation? However the answers to this question may be charac-
terized, they constitute the norm for all subsequent accounts of salvation,
regardless of the possible greater influence which later accounts may have
exercised within the Christian community. 13
The net effect of insisting upon the foundational or chronological aspect
of biblical inspiration is to distinguish conceptually between biblical books
which have not had much of an influence upon the church and postbiblical
works which have. 14 "Christian Scripture" is defined as that which is norma-
tive and foundational for the Christian church, 15 and "biblical inspiration" is
how the church accounts for the commonality of ways of experiencing God's
salvation on the part of Christian believers throughout history.
It can be seen that the fourth criterion of biblical inspiration, involving
chronological priority, it but the reverse side of the question of canonization.
Canonization refers to the historical process of certain Christian works being
brought together to comprise a yardstick or measure (Greek: kanon) by
which the church would evaluate and regulate the Christianness of salvation.
When faced on the one hand with a large and growing corpus of writings
by Christian believers and on the other with an increasingly diverse set of
practices and doctrines each claiming to be Christian, the church had to
articulate criteria by which to distinguish proper from improper expressions
of Christianity, As Hans von Campenhausen shows in his masterful The
Formation of the Christian Bible, however:
It is purely arbitrary to make liturgical use, or formal definition, or the con-
cept of inspiration, or, worse still, official ecclesiastical confirmation the only
criterion . . . of what is canonical. The fundamental idea —in keeping with the
word —is the status of a standard or norm which some writing or collection of
writings has acquired for faith and life. Its binding character must be universally
and definitively recognised. As a result of this the demarcation of the canonical
from non-canonical material in the course of time follows to some extent auto-
matically; and because the Canon testifies to the divine revelation, and because
God as the Initiator of Inspiration \ 13
its authority is of divine, not human origin, further reflection attributes it almost
at once to a special, direct intervention or inspiration of God. 16
That is, the criteria by which we most often evaluate the Christianness of
given actions or beliefs are not the same ones that the church employed
before the formation of a recognized canon, precisely because no such
canon existed for it at that time. The criterion for this precanon church was
rather the actual authority or influence which a given work exercised in
concrete ecclesial situations. (This is what von Campenhausen means by the
"binding character" of a writing.) Reflection on the presence of this influence
within the Christian community, an influence which drew the attention of
the community primarily to God rather than to any human agency, led to
the conclusion that God was the ultimate initiator or author of the work, a
conclusion known then and now as inspiration.
The notions of foundationality and canonicity bring to mind that issue
which has traditionally gone under the name of the "cessation of revelation."
(This is an imprecise description since what was meant was not that God
ceased all self-revelatory activity but rather that God ceased any qualitatively
new self-revelatory activity. ) The issue arose as a response to the question of
why the church does not continue to add materials to its scripture, which is
the question of the closing of the canon. Von Campenhausen asserts that
the canon was closed primarily because of the influence of Montanists,
an enthusiastic (or perhaps charismatic) and apocalyptic sect of the late
second and third centuries. The presence of the spirit of prophecy in the
Montanists prompted them to treat the New Testament itself as openly as
the first generations of Christians had treated the Old, that is, to view it as
an intermediary step within the entire sweep of progressive revelation. What
this implied, of course, was that the notion of salvation contained within
the New Testament was subject to whatever reformulation the spirit of the
Montanists might reveal, and it was with respect to this implication both that
Montanism was declared an improper choice (i.e., a heresy) and that the
impulse to close the canon came into being:
The critical point beyond which Montanism became a sect is thus not directly
connected with their attitude to the Canon; it lies instead in the movement's
estimate of its own position in salvation-history, which was of course bound
to clash with the concept of a canonical norm. Because the Montanists were
not prepared to give up attaching absolute value to the extravagant authority
of their spirit and their founding prophets, they necessarily exempted them
from any further test. . . . In this way they went behind Christian "beginnings,"
and thus beyond the Canon which was meant to determine and preserve those
beginnings. 17
114 Evangelical Theories of Biblical Inspiration
A Concluding Comment
In this chapter we have discussed the concept of divine inspiration and have
introduced four criteria by which to designate biblical inspiration as a subset
of divine inspiration. The usefulness of these criteria rests in their relating
the narrower concept to the wider one, which allows us to say that both types
of inspiration operate in the same formal manner but yet are not identical.
I shall now summarize my theory of biblical inspiration. The phrase
"biblical inspiration" initially points not to the Bible but to Christian believers
who have experienced salvation from God through the Bible. Since this
experience is a saving experience, it is referred to as a self-transcendence
whose ultimate initiator is God. Because the emphasis in all acts of divine
inspiration is upon God as initiator and humans as recipients, the condition
sine qua non of biblical inspiration is salvation by God. To discuss the
inspiration of the Bible apart from the context of the saving activity of God
is formally as moot as to discuss the inspiration of an artist who has never
painted or a teacher who has never had students. All attempts to account for
God as the Initiator of Inspiration 115
biblical inspiration which fail to rest upon the presence of salvation in the
human recipient at best are only ambiguously Christian and at worst ground
the specificity of Christianity in such nonreligious concepts as logic, interior
feelings, historical accuracy, or the like.
The greatest advantage which I believe attaches to my theory of biblical
inspiration is that it does not shift the focus of Christian belief away from the
saving presence of God among believers. That is, in order to understand the
present concept of inspiration, one does not have to be saved and assent to a
doctrine of inerrancy, a formal concept of logic, a certain understanding of
history, or anything else. The presence of salvation by itself is the sufficient
sign of the operation of biblical inspiration, because salvation alone is that
which God desires for all persons (1 Timothy 2:4).
At this point, it is appropriate to step back and address the larger question
of the aim of this study. It was triggered by the collision of three observations.
The first is that the Bible is used authoritatively in the church, the second
is that the traditional Christian way to account for this authority has been to
say that the Bible is inspired, and the third is that most explanations of this
account have been unsuccessful. The first reason is that they characteristi-
cally assume that inspiration is a phenomenon which can terminate in a book.
The second reason is that they gratuitously confuse talk about the Bible with
talk about God, thus unconsciously investing the Bible with characteristics
which properly belong only to God. In particular, it is the divine character-
istics of comprehensiveness and indeceivability which arise so uncannily in
discussions about the Bible. These two reasons, then, constituted the bases
for my critical activity in the first two chapters of this book.
William Abraham's work on inspiration helped to locate the weakness of
traditional accounts of inspiration by pointing out that acts which are properly
called inspired acts have a tripartite rather than a bipartite structure. That is,
in any inspired act it is possible to identify an initiating agent, a medium, and
a receiving agent. In general, then, an inspired act would be one in which
the receiving agent's life is enhanced by the initiating agent by means of the
medium in ways which are appropriate to that medium.
Armed with this insight, I then set out to see how biblical inspiration
might be construed. Building upon a further hint from Abraham, I began
by reflecting upon the third category of the receiving agent; we are more
familiar with these agents since in principle, at least, they include ourselves.
I determined that biblical inspiration is a mediated enhancement of human
existence by God, the Father of Jesus, through the Bible ("through the Bible"
here means in conformity with or in dependence upon the Bible). I also
proposed that all of the ways that the doctrine of God may be understood,
the one which best coordinates with this understanding of inspiration is that
offered by the school of transcendental Thomism, which (broadly put) insists
116 Evangelical Theories of Biblical Inspiration
that God's acts always be seen as mediated through the world rather than
immediately occurring in the world.
Reflection upon this way of construing biblical inspiration led to the
observation that only Christians call the Bible inspired in this way. That
is, biblical inspiration is not a property of the words or even the message
of the Bible per se but is rather the way that Christianly saved persons
retrace the route of their salvation from God through the Bible to the actual
communities in which they were saved. Thus, the possession of salvation
is intrinsic or constitutive to the description, if not also the definition, of
biblical inspiration. Put into conceptual terms, it is not the words or message
alone which are inspired since words and messages cannot receive inspiration.
Only reasoning creatures can receive inspiration. Put into more existential
or concrete terms, the words and message of the Bible are only said to be
inspired when they are received by the community which they have inspired,
that is, when they are read as God's word by that community which God
has created through them. Since it is only this saved community (i.e., the
church) which confesses the Bible as inspired, the definition of inspiration
must include salvation as God's enhancement of human life through the
Bible.
There are two potential weaknesses to my proposal. The first is that it
simply sounds odd to say that biblical inspiration primarily has to do with
Christian salvation rather than properties or characteristics of a book. It seems
as though this way of construing inspiration is off the subject much as I
accused many other theories of being off the subject in confusing the doctrine
of the Bible with the doctrine of God.
I would argue that 1 do not commit a similar confusion. It is certainly the
case that the Christian tradition is accustomed to calling the Bible inspired in
what we might call a passive sense, the sense that assumes that the Bible itself
receives divine inspiration and then invites us to search for the properties of
inspiration within it. But this approach is wrongheaded because it ignores
the fact that only the Christianly saved community believes that the Bible
is inspired. Properties, on the other hand, are phenomena which are present
independent of belief, at least in their usual sense, and are therefore true of the
object to which they apply regardless of the belief structure of any particular
observer. For example, some properties of the Christian Bible are that it has
sixty-six books, two major sections or testaments, several minor sections
such as law, prophets, writings, gospels, epistles and apocalyptic, and so
on. Because only the Christian community of belief accepts the inspiration
of the Bible, however, inspiration is not a belief-independent property like
these.
The second and perhaps greater weakness of my proposal is that in denying
that inspiration is a property of the Bible itself, it seems to eviscerate
God as the Initiator of Inspiration 117
Introduction
1. James T. Burtchaell, Catholic Theories of Biblical Inspiration since 1810 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 279-80.
2. See, for, example Kennith Kantzer, "Unity and Diversity in Evangelical Faith,"
in David F. Wells and John D. Woodbridge, eds., The Evangelicals (Nashville:
Abingdon Press, 1975), p. 38; and Robert K. Johnston, Evangelicals at an Impasse
(Atlanta: John Knox, 1979), p. 3.
3. James D. G. Dunn, Unity and Diversity in the New Testament: An Inquiry into
the Character of Earliest Christianity (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1977).
Chapter 1
1. William Abraham, The Divine Inspiration of Holy Scripture (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1981), p. 11.
2. Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology (Philadelphia: Pres-
byterian and Reformed, 1974), p. 31.
3. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977),
Vol. I, p. 2. All references are to Volume I unless otherwise noted.
4. Ibid., p. 3.
5. Ibid., p. 10.
6. Ibid., p. 11.
7. Ibid.
8. In his biography of his father, A. A. Hodge notes that the publication of the
original seven volumes of the Systematic Theology stretched from 1870 to 1872. A. A.
Hodge, The Life of Charles Hodge (New York: Arno and the New York Times, 1969),
p. 451.
9. Hodge, Systematic Theology, p. 14.
10. Ibid., p. 17.
11. That is, advances in the theory or understanding of knowledge.
119
120 Notes
12. We will see an example of such openness below when we consider Hodge's
treatment of geological evolution.
13. Hodge, Systematic Theology, pp. 151-88.
14. Ibid., p. 153.
15. Ibid., p. 154.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., p. 155.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., p. 158.
20. ". . . [N]o prophecy is a matter of one's own interpretation because no prophecy
ever came by the impulse of man, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from
God."
21. Hodge, Systematic Theology, p. 158.
22. Ibid., pp. 156-57.
23. Ibid., p. 164.
24. Ibid., Vol. Ill, pp. 245-58
25. Ibid., Vol. II, p. 257.
26. Ibid., Vol. I, p. 163.
27. Ibid., p. 165.
28. Ibid., pp. 164-65.
29. Ibid., pp. 169-72.
30. Quoted in Jack Rogers and Donald McKim, The Authority and Interpretation
of the Bible (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 288, citing the letter as printed
in The Presbyterian 48 (January 12, 1878): 9.
31. John Leith, ed., Creeds of the Church (Richmond: John Knox, 1963-73), p.
195.
32. Ibid.
33. For a critique of this analysis, see John H. Gerstner, "Warfields's Case for
Biblical Inerrancy," in John Warwick Montgomery, ed., God's Inerrant Word (Min-
neapolis: Bethany Fellowship, 1974), pp. 115-42. Gerstner attempts to distinguish
between the "proof that the Bible is the Word of God and the "persuasion of the
acceptance" that it is so (p. 117). The distinction is elusive unless one specifies
"proof as (perhaps) logical demonstration and "persuasion" as (perhaps) extralogical
certainty, which Gerstner does not do.
34. John Woodbridge objects to the notion that a perceptible shift was introduced
at this point by Hodge and later by Warfield. In particular, Woodbridge claims that the
framers of the Westminster Confession (1643-1649) distinguished the earliest Greek
and Hebrew manuscripts from the original autographs (or "sources") and thus that
the importance of the distinction was recognized well before Charles Hodge. John
D. Woodbridge, Biblical Authority (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982), esp. chaps. VI
and VII. This objection, which Woodbridge admits as tentative (p. 115), does not
directly challenge the point made here concerning the conceptual difference between
viewing biblical authority as inferred from discernibly inerrant autographs on the one
hand and recognizing it as a result of the interior work of the Holy Spirit on the other.
Regardless of how early in history one encounters the autographs argument, it is just a
Notes 121
different approach to the notion of biblical authority from one which does not depend
upon any external or inferential warrants.
35. A. A. Hodge, The Life, p. 256.
36. Sandeen notes, "Most twentieth-century Fundamentalists and many twentieth-
century historians have mistakenly assumed that Protestantism possessed a strong,
fully integrated theology of biblical authority which was attacked by advocates of the
higher criticism [but,] as we shall see, no such theology existed before 1850. . . . A
systematic theology of ... the infallibility of the Bible had to be created in the midst of
the nineteenth-century controversy." Ernest Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism
(Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1978), p. 106.
37. See Sidney E. Ahlstrom, "The Scottish Philosophy and American Theology,"
Church History 24 (1955): 257-72; and George M. Mavrodes, Fundamentalism and
American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), esp. pp. 16-28 and
110-16.
38. Hodge, Systematic Theology, p. 4.
39. Or "enthusiastic"; see Sandeen, Roots of Fundamentalism, p. 116.
40. Ibid., p. 9.
41. In a manner of speaking. Mike Parsons notes that John Witherspoon, Scottish
immigrant and later president of the College of New Jersey at Princeton, "was probably
the first Scot to go to a teaching post in America fully acquainted with [Reid's] work."
"Warfield and Scripture," The Churchman 91 (1977): 201.
42. Thomas Reid, Philosophical Works (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuch-
handlung, 1967), Vol. I, p. 440.
43. Rogers and Mckim, Authority and Interpretation, p. 291.
44. Abraham, Divine Inspiration, p. 15. For a similar evaluation, see Gerstner,
"Warfield's Case," p. 115.
45. Sandeen, Roots of Fundamentalism, p. 115.
46. A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield, Inspiration, ed. by Roger Nicole (Grand
Rapids: Baker, 1979), p. vii, hereafter cited as Nicole. Both Nicole and Gerstner
provide extensive primary and secondary bibliographies concerning Warfield's view
of inspiration.
47. Ibid.
48. His inaugural address upon induction to the chair of New Testament Literature
and Exegesis, Western Theological Seminary, 1880.
49. In The International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia, 5 vols. , ed. by James Orr
(Chicago: Howard Severence, 1915), Vol. 3, pp. 1473-83.
50. Nicole, Inspiration, p. x.
51. Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield, The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible,
ed. by Samuel G. Craig (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1948), p. 210.
In his The Uses of Scripture in Recent Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975),
David Kelsey calls attention to the peculiarity of this claim in Warfield's theology.
He notes that Warfield believed that inspiration was logically dispensable but that
it was also methodologically indispensable (pp. 21-2). It is the former because it
could be omitted without damage to any other doctrine, as we just saw. It is also the
latter because, given the fact that inspiration is "taught" by Scripture, it is of necessity
122 Notes
the basic hermeneutical rule guiding the church's use of Scripture. Kelsey concludes
from this that inspiration thus functions for Warfield as "a vast hypothesis . . . like
the Copernican theory or the theory of evolution," a conclusion with which I would
concur.
52. We will consider below Warfield's subsequent and deliberate qualification of
his inductivism.
53. Warfield, Inspiration and Authority, p. 206. Thus, the opinion of Gerstner
("Warfield's Case," p. 120) that the beginning point of Warfield's epistemology is
"sense experience" is untenable. Significantly, Gerstner does not offer a single citation
from Warfield's voluminous writings in support of this claim. Genuine inductivism
must have been important for Gerstner in a way that it does not appear to have been
for Warfield.
54. Cornelius Van Til thus refers to the "Creator-creature distinction" as funda-
mental to all Christian hermeneutical activity. See his "Introduction" in Warfield,
Inspiration and Authority, esp. p. 31.
55. Ibid., p. 80.
56. Parsons criticizes Warfield for his fundamental reorientation of Calvinist the-
ology from theocentricity to anthropocentricity dominated by the "almost hysterical
quest for certainty" in religious matters. "Man's need, rather than God's word became
the guide in doctrinal formulations" ("Warfield and Scripture," p. 200). This does not
seem to be a significant criticism in view of the fact that the necessity of Scripture
has traditionally been taken by all Christians to be correlative to the necessity of
salvation. One wonders what Calvin's theocentricity would amount to if the human
need for salvation were subtracted from it.
57. Warfield, Inspiration and Authority, p. 420.
58. Ibid., pp. 420-42.
59. Ibid., p. 173.
60. Ibid., p. 95.
61. A representative repudiation of dictation theories may be found in Nicole,
Inspiration, p. 19. Nicole notes that Hodge actually penned these words (p. xii), but
they are, of course, representative of both authors.
62. Warfield, Inspiration and Authority, pp. 131-66.
63. "All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for
correction, and for training in righteousness. . . . "
64. Warfield, Inspiration and Authority, pp. 132-33.
65. " . . . [N]o prophecy ever came by the impulse of man, but men moved by the
Holy Spirit spoke from God."
66. Warfield, Inspiration and Authority, p. 137.
67. Ibid., pp. 421^4-2, see also Nicole, Inspiration, p. 42.
68. Ibid., pp. 150-52. Gerstner ("Warfield's Case,"p. 134) admits that Warfield's
use of "human" in this and similar texts is "unfortunate" because "the whole 'con-
cursus' concept is against [this docetic notion of Scripture]." Gerstner's apology is
vitiated by the fact that Warfield is here presenting his own understanding of "con-
cursus."
69. Ibid., pp. 154-60.
Notes 123
70. See John Calvin, Institutes, Bk. I, Ch, VI, Pt. IV: "It is true that all things are
actuated by a secret instinct of nature, as though they obeyed the eternal command
of God, and that what God has once appointed, appears to proceed from voluntary
inclination in the creatures."
71. Warfield, Inspiration and Authority, p. 160.
72. This was a position long held by Warfield. See his response to objections made
against the article coauthored in 1881 with A. A. Hodge, included as Appendix A in
Nicole, Inspiration, pp. 73-76.
73. Abraham (Divine Inspiration, pp. 36-37) argues persuasively that although
Warfield and his contemporaries abandoned the use of dictation, they did not aban-
don the effects of dictation, that is, verbal inerrancy and the other divine qual-
ities of the Bible. Thus, "the difference between the two views is just one of
terminology. . . . This whole emphasis on words is a carry-over from a dictation the-
ory."
74. For example, Inspiration and Authority, pp. 93-94.
75. Sandeen says that the article "Inspiration" by Hodge and Warfield in 1881
"elevated the concept to an especially prominent place" (Roots of Fundamentalism,
p. 128). Since Warfield's 1880 address to the Western Theological Seminary faculty
does not mention the autographs in a context ("Inspiration and Criticism") in which
such mention would be expected, it is possible that Charles Hodge, whose 1879
revision of his Outlines of Theology included references to the autographs, introduced
the concept to him.
76. Thus Woodbridge, Biblical Authority, pp. 129-35.
77. Abraham, Divine Inspiration, p. 15.
78. Hodge, Systematic Theology, p. 170.
79. Nicole, Inspiration, p. 41.
80. Which he defines, as Hodge did, as inconsistency among biblical assertions
or proven variance with historical or scientific facts (Ibid., pp. 45, 54).
81. "Scripture cannot be broken."
82. This raises the related question of canon formation, which Warfield treats
explicitly in a short article, "The Formation of the Canon of the New Testament,"
written in 1892 and included in Inspiration and Authority, pp. 411-16.
83. The mechanism that he employs here is to distinguish between errors and "dif-
ficulties," to deny the existence of the former in modern copies (Nicole, Inspiration, p.
44), and then to note that the phenomenon of textual criticism implicitly presumes the
existence of an authoritative and therefore inerrant autograph (Warfield. Inspiration
and Authority, pp. 104-05.
84. See above, note 73.
85. Warfield, Inspiration and Authority, pp. 106-12.
86. Parsons, "Warfield and Scripture," p. 207; emphasis added. Sandeen writes,
"For Charles Hodge's dependence upon the previously acquired biblical reverence,
B. B. Warfield substituted the externally verified credibility of the apostles as teachers
of doctrine" (Roots of Fundamentalism, p. 120).
87. Nicole, Inspiration, p. 36.
88. A "serious discrepancy," for example, would be that Job and Ecclesiastes both
124 Notes
deny the possibility of reward and punishment in the afterlife, whereas Pauline and
later Gospel texts clearly affirm them as actual.
89. Warfield, Inspiration and Authority, p. 118.
90. Ibid., pp. 223-24.
91. Or perhaps overwhelm.
92. Sandeen, Roots of Fundamentalism, chap. 10, esp. pp. 253-60.
93. We shall see below that his is a refined sort of inductivism, however.
94. A frequently used phrase and, in addition, the title of one of his Christianity
Today columns (March 3, 1967), reprinted in John Warwick Montgomery, The Suicide
of Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Bethany Fellowship, 1971), pp. 356-58. Many
of Montgomery's articles have enjoyed multiple publishings under various titles and
with slight revisions, a fact which at times causes confusion.
95. A paper delivered to the 20th Annual Convention of the American Scientific
Affiliation, August 24, 1965, reprinted in Montgomery, Suicide, pp. 267-313.
96. Ibid., p. 271.
97. Ibid., p. 287.
98. Montgomery's familiarity with Wittgenstein conies at least partially from his
undergraduate mentor at Cornell, Max Black, whose A Companion to Wittgenstein's
'Tractatus' (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1964) he calls "an exceedingly
valuable work." Ibid., p. 300.
99. Ibid., p. 273.
100. Ibid., p. 274, quoting Black, "The Definition of Scientific Method," in his
Problems of Analysis: Philosophical Essays (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1954), p. 23.
101. Although illustrations could be given without end, Montgomery cites the
example of the discovery by Watson and Crick of the double-helix structure of the
DNA molecule. Ibid., pp. 272-73.
102. The imagination suggests what may be the case in reality, as is seen in C. S.
Pierce's category of abduction: "Abduction is the process of forming an explanatory
hypothesis. It is the only logical operation which introduces any new idea." C. S.
Pierce, Collected Papers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), Vol.
V, para. 171. Montgomery denies, however, that he is in any way committed to
Pierce's pragmatic philosophy; see ibid., p. 302.
103. Ibid., p. 276.
104. Ibid.
105. Ibid., p. 287.
106. Ibid., p. 277.
107. Montgomery evaluates this criterion higher than that of predictability per se.
He does not say why (ibid., p. 278); perhaps the reason is the one noted above,
that theory often exceeds the possibility of experimental verification, even if only
temporarily. Thus, no competing theories may claim predictive superiority prior to
experimental verification.
108. Ibid., p. 278, quoting Ian Ramsey, Models and Mystery (London: Oxford
University Press, 1964), p. 17.
109. Ibid., pp. 281-82.
Notes 125
127. Clearly Montgomery means for the "if to be read as "since," but this then
becomes a confession of faith and not a straightforward empirical observation.
128. A further unresolved question is how the mind distinguishes between "data"
and "norms" in what it encounters in the Scripture. Montgomery gives no clue to an
answer here.
129. See p. 30 herein.
130. However, his refusal to include "faith" as one of those elements calling for
empirical or inductive analysis is, at best, puzzling; see above, p. 32.
131. It is not claimed that he at all times and in all places reflects them accurately,
however. For example, he borrows Ian Ramsey's shoe-foot analogy but curiously
rejects the reason for which Ramsey pressed it into service. Ramsey's point is that
Christian theories, or doctrines, are counted successful as they account for the lives
lived by Christians. He has thus been called a personalist empiricist, which means
that his theology primarily attempts to account for the actual shape of a believer's life
rather than primarily intending to form it. His theology is more descriptive than it is
normative. See Terrence Tilley's 1976 Ph.D. dissertation for the Graduate Theolog-
ical Union in Berkeley, California, entitled "On Being Tentative in Theology: The
Thought of Ian T. Ramsey," where he notes Ramsey's claim that "[religious] lan-
guage arises from experience —and experience is never purely subjective —and thus
has a referent" (p. 123). Nor does Montgomery seem to appreciate the significance of
the difference between Ludwig Wittgenstein's earlier Tractatus Logico-Philsophicus
and later Philosophical Investigations. As Anthony Thiselton notes in his analysis
of Wittgenstein's influence on philosophical hermeneutics, in the Tractatus the con-
clusion was "that all meaning must be determinate and exact" because meaning is
expressed in elementary propositions which themselves reflect simply objects. The
Two Horizons: New Testament Hermeneutics and Philosophical Description (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), p. 378. The later work, though "consists in showing how
changes of linguistic surroundings affect particular concepts" or propositions; thus,
that their meaning is largely, but not entirely, relative to the context in which they
are made (p. 375). Thiselton also notes that the difference between the two outlooks
can be characterized by Wittgenstein's moving away from "a sharp dualism between
fact and value" and toward the unity of "human life in all its variety and complexity"
(p. 39). Montgomery, not surprisingly, quotes approvingly from the earlier Tractatus
("the sense of the world must lie outside the world," 6.41) to validate his claim that
religious certainty is located outside of the human subject: "Absolute truth and eternal
value, if they exist at all, must take their origin from outside the flux of the human
situation." Montgomery, Suicide, p. 365.
132. The article most directly relevant to this examination has been published in
three different places, each time with minor revisions: "Inspiration and Inerrancy: A
New Departure," The Evangelical Theological Society Bulletin, Spring 1965; Crisis
in Lutheran Theology, Vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1967), pp. 15^44; and Suicide,
pp. 314-55. I have used the last source.
133. Montgomery, Suicide, p. 314, referring to James Orr, The Progress of
Dogma, 4th ed. (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1901).
134. Ibid.
135. Ibid., p. 317.
Notes \ 27
who are and are not "separatist" in nature as determined by their ecclesiology, and
his criticism of such separatism. This is precisely the criterion I have adopted to
distinguish fundamentalists from evangelicals. See Ronald H. Nash, ed., The Case
for Biblical Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1969), pp. 40-47, esp. p. 42.
Carnell's article was originally published in The Christian Century, March 30, 1960.
I shall only examine his treatment of "lower" criticism because of its relevance to the
acts of the knowing mind.
175. Ibid., p. 199.
176. Ibid.
177. Ibid., p. 200.
178. Carnell explicitly affirms that his approach is a priori or "rationalistic," and
he does so because of his insistence upon the doctrine of God as the only legitimate
starting point for theology and epistemology. See Chapter IX in his Apologetics, which
he begins by affirming Gordon Clark's statement that "instead of beginning with the
facts and later discovering God, unless a thinker begins with God, he can never end
with God, or get the facts either," citing Clark, A Christian Philosophy of Education
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1946), p. 38.
179. This is precisely the interpretation of Warfield offered by David Kelsey in
Uses of Scripture, pp. 23-24.
Chapter 2
1. Carl F. H. Henry, Personal Idealism and Strong's Theology (Wheaton, 111.: Van
Kampen, 1951), p. 11. The other three are William Newton Clarke, Alvah Hovey,
and George W. Northrup.
2. A. H. Strong, Systematic Theology (Old Tappan, N.J.: Fleming H. Revell,
1907), p. 3. Interestingly, these are later paralleled by Alvin Plantinga's list of "prop-
erly basic beliefs," that is, beliefs which are utterly reasonable to hold but with respect
to which no inductive evidence is possible or necessary. His list includes "perceptual
beliefs, memory beliefs, beliefs ascribing mental states to other persons," and belief
in God; see Alvin Plantinga, "The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology," Chris-
tian Scholar's Review 11 (1982): 187-98; and "The Reformed Objection Revisited,"
Christian Scholar's Review 12 (1982): esp. 57.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., pp. 3-4.
5. Ibid., p. 10.
6. Ibid., p. 7.
7. Ibid., p. 10.
8. John Henry Newman makes the distinction here between '"certitude" and "cer-
tainty" respectively. See John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of
Assent (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), esp. pp. 173-77; and
the excellent review and critique offered by H. Francis Davis, "Newman on Faith and
Personal Certitude," Journal of Theological Studies ns 12 (1961): 248-59.
9. Strong, Systematic Theology, p. 111.
10. Ibid.
130 Notes
81. He is, of course, conversant with other evangelical traditions; we have already
encountered him in our consideration of B. B. Warfield. He does not claim that the
Wesleyan tradition has influenced his concept of inspiration in ways peculiar to We-
sleyanism, and neither do I. His value as a Wesleyan, therefore, is in illustrating the
transdenominational character of evangelicalism which this study takes as a constituent
in the definition of evangelicalism.
82. In particular, we saw the blurring of this distinction in Montgomery, who
grounds the truthfulness of all biblical assertions on the datum: "If Christ is God,
then He speaks the truth concerning the . . . Old Testament and of the . . . New
Testament. . . . It follows . . . that all biblical assertions . . . are to be regarded as
revealed truth." As Ramm points outs, this approach confuses "content" and "accep-
tance of content." It also assumes gratuitously that inspiration requires inerrancy.
83. In an unpublished review of Paul Achtemeier's The Inspiration of Scripture
(Philadelphia: Westminster, 1980), Abraham writes with respect to divine activity
in inspiration: "At this point there is no alternative, in my view, to going back and
covering the ground so marvelously opened up by Aquinas and his doctrine of analogy
and so judiciously illuminated by the extensive work on religious language inspired
by Wittgenstein." Abraham does not, however, cite any Thomistic sources in Divine
Inspiration. Part of my critique of him will be that his work is incomplete in just
those areas where contemporary Thomists have been most productive.
84. Abraham, Divine Inspiration, pp. 7, 9.
85. Abraham notes that all evangelical theories, regardless of other differences,
are united in their use of the term "plenary" (or "verbal") inspiration. What this term
intends to signal, he says, is that divine inspiration is a property of the words of
Scripture, though not necessarily a result of mechanistic dictation on the part of God.
Plenary inspiration thus rejects immediate divine intervention at the point of the writing
of Scripture. It also allows for stylistic differences by a process whose description by
Abraham is essentially that which is usually called divine providence; see ibid., p. 4.
Not all would agree with this account of plenary inspiration. For example, Warfield
accepted immediate divine intervention at the point of the writing of Scripture, and
he is deliberate in using the word "plenary" to refer to his account of inspiration.
86. Ibid., p. 37.
87. The major problem is that regardless of how energetically evangelicals reject
dictation as the mode of inspiration, they end up accepting it under another name
when they confuse inspiration with speaking; see Chapter 1, note 73, herein.
88. Abraham, Divine Inspiration, pp. 63, 61. The reader here begins to notice
Abraham's appreciation of Thomas, especially that interpretation of Thomas offered
by the so-called school of transcendental Thomists. Since the last chapter will consider
transcendental Thomism in more detail, I shall not pause to address it here except to
note the affinity between Abraham's quote and the method of philosophical inquiry
summarized as "coming to understand by grasping the proportionate likenesses among
examples" by David Burrell in Exercises in Religious Understanding (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1974), pp. 4—5.
89. Ibid., p. 62.
90. Ibid., chap. 3, "The Concept of Inspiration," pp. 63-75.
134 Notes
91. Philosophers of language would say that the enriching of one's learning fac-
ulties is "analytic" to the concept of inspiration. What is analytic to a concept is that
which is necessary for its proper meaning and use and in whose absence one is not
talking of the same concept. Although it is often difficult to specify all of the analytic
elements of a concept, it is not difficult to specify individual ones. Abraham does not
claim that his paradigm illustrates all necessary members of the concept of inspiration,
but only that the ones he lists are necessary members.
92. The similarity of Abraham's language here with explicitly sacramental lan-
guage ought not be overlooked. Lutherans, for example, have traditionally insisted on
using the prepositions, "in, with, and under . . . to designate the presence of the body
[and blood] of Christ in the Lord's Supper." Francis Pieper, Christian Dogmatics (St.
Louis: Concordia, 1953), Vol. Ill, p. 345; see pp. 353-64 for a fuller explanation.
This linguistic usage illustrates the claim that the Bible is a sacrament and that faith
must be present in the readers of the Bible in order for it to be apprehended as
the medium of God's self-revelation. The negative significance of this claim is that
deductivist theories of inspiration ignore the sacramental aspect of Scripture when
they insist upon discernible manifestations of divinity such as the inerrancy of the text
itself.
93. This is surely what Abraham had in mind when he spoke about the "work on
religious language inspired by Wittgenstein," note 83, above.
94. Thus, with respect to the example cited above in Chapter 1, note 88, a
discernible degree of difference exists between Job and Ecclesiastes on the one hand
and Wisdom of Solomon, Paul, and Revelation on the other concerning the concept
of reward in the afterlife. According to my criterion, it is the latter view which on
historical grounds is seen to be "inspired," because that view has shaped the church's
understanding of the afterlife while the former has not. This raises the question, which
strictly speaking is tangential to the topic of this study, of "progressive revelation."
Evangelicals have understood progressive revelation as that which accounts for the
"internal organic development" of the doctrines of Christian faith (see Charles Hodge,
Systematic Theology, pp. 446^-7). But this is simply a recognition of the fact that
not all biblical authors say the same thing about the same subject, as in the case of
postdeath retribution. Hodge's discussion, to be sure, presumes that the development
occurs within the limits of logical consistency: "All that is in a full-grown tree was
potentially in the seed." What is important to notice with respect to the concept of
progressive revelation, though, is that its sole usefulness is its ability to account for
existing discernible differences. Were there no such differences exhibited within the
Bible, "progressive revelation" would not be needed to account for them.
95. In Exercises, Burrell illustrates the same point in his discussion of the peculiar
way in which God is said to be good according to Thomas in Summa Theologiae,
Book I, Questions 5a, b. The usual assessment or evaluation of goodness cannot apply
to God, since "P is good" implies a standard of goodness which exists logically prior
to P, and nothing exists prior to God. Therefore, "God is good" can only mean that
God is the one whose existence is the condition for our being attracted or drawn to
whatever it is that we assess as good. The specific illustration is of a person "thanking
us for everything we did for him, when we were conscious simply of doing what was
ours to do. He might retort to our disclaimer: so much the better; you are an immense
Notes 135
help to me just by being around and being yourself. . . . In this sense, then, God's
being good is more like his being utterly desirable because he is so much himself,
so much his own being that his very presence promises to help put me in touch with
mine." Exercises, p. 111. This serves neatly as an illustration of a noninformative
case of inspiration, although it is not claimed that Burrell intended it as such.
96. For example, the model of the speaking prophet in Hodge and Warfield, the
model of historical consistency in Montgomery, and the model of logical consistency
in Carnell.
97. In the same way, for example, that believers and unbelievers alike are equally
able to discern instances of historical discrepancies, logical inconsistencies, and the
like.
98. Burrell comments with respect to Thomas: "Aquinas' mode of inquiry offers a
therapy specifically designed for anyone whose interest in things divine tends to turn
those things into questions." Exercises, p. 136. Ian T. Ramsey makes the same point:
"We shall only take up a theological standpoint towards the universe if we have a
questioning mind, which pursues its questions until there breaks in on us a situation
which is characterized by depth, wonderment, and so on." Religious Language: An
Empirical Placing of Theological Phrases (London: SCM, 1963), pp. 86-7.
99. Ibid., p. 11.
100. Ibid., p. 75.
101. See the article "Hermeneutics" by Raymond Brown in Jerome Biblical Com-
mentary, especially 71:66, where he says, "To decide from a philosophical theory
of instrumentality what God could and could not have done in inspiring scripture is
risky. . . . It is far better to work a posteriori: to see what God has done and then to
formulate a theory that can account for it."
Chapter 3
1. See, for example, the different meanings to be derived from the different order
given to the cleansing of the Temple by Matthew and Mark. Mark intentionally
locates the Temple story inside the story of the cursing of the fig tree, thereby alerting
his readers that neither story may be understood apart from the other (Mark 11:12-
25). Matthew, on the other hand, dissociates these stories in his narrative (Matthew
21:12-22). Regardless of which of these accounts (if either) accurately reflects "what
happened," it is clear that the meaning for the evangelist and the reader is located in
the narrative structure and not in the bare events themselves.
2. Abraham, The Divine Inspiration of Holy Scripture (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1981), p. 6. Thomas A. Hoffman, S.J., notes the same uneasiness concerning
inspiration within the Roman Catholic tradition. See his excellent article "Inspiration,
Normativeness, Canonicity, and the Unique Sacred Character of the Bible," Catholic
Biblical Quarterly 44 (1982): 447-69, which begins with the sentence "The doctrine
of biblical inspiration . . . has come upon hard times."
3. R. Hooykas attempts to do the same thing in his Religion and the Rise of Modern
Science (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978), but from the discipline of science rather
than theology.
4. I am not ignoring my criticism of the inductivism of Hodge, Warfield, et al. The
136 Notes
point here is that they believed that they were being faithful to the inductive approach,
and they utilized it because they recognized its success in the natural sciences.
5. In addition to the Montgomery discussion above, see Francis Schaeffer, The
God Who Is There (Downers Grove, 111.: Inter-Varsity, 1970); Two Contents, Two
Realities (Downers Grove, 111.: Inter-Varsity, 1974); and especially No Final Conflict:
The Bible Without Error in All That It Affirms (Downers Grove, 111.: Inter-Varsity,
1970). See also Harold Lindsell's The Battle for the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan,
1976).
6. The reader is cautioned to distinguish between the inspiration of the Bible and
talk of the inspiration of the Bible. In conceptual terms, the distinction is between first-
order and second-order activities, or experience and reflection. This is what James
Burtchaell means when he laments, "Most inspiration theory has not been talk about
the Bible. It has been talk about talk about the Bible"; see his Catholic Theories of
Biblical Inspiration since 1810 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p.
283.
7. We have already referred to Thiselton's The Two Horizons in the consideration
of Montgomery. See also Gerald Sheppard, "Biblical Hermeneutics: The Academic
Language of Evangelical Indentity," Union Quarterly Seminary Review 32 (1977):
81-94; and "Recovering the Natural Sense" Theology Today 38 (1981): 330-37.
8. Christianity Today is a journal which is frequently read and cited by evangelicals
and within which issues of current interest to evangelicals are usually brought to
light. Its own self-description is that it is "a magazine of evangelical commitment."
In a recent issue, the journal "rejoined the origins debate" and rendered a cautious
and qualified acceptance of various geological-cosmological conclusions traditionally
represented more by the evolutionists than by the creationists in the ongoing American
debate. Such an openness to positions previously resisted by the journal, coupled
with a vigorous exchange within the particular issue itself, is evidence of the relative
flexibility of evangelicalism which distinguishes it from Protestant fundamentalism.
See Christianity Today 26 (8 October 1982): 22-45.
9. To say that the point of creature language is to situate persons vertically and
horizontally is to affirm, not deny, the importance of cosmogony and related fields of
study. This study simply chooses to discuss a particular aspect of cosmogony, namely,
its theological implications.
10. More will be said about this transcendental relationship in Chapter 5.
11. That is, between animals and humans.
12. The obverse of this realization —that animals have rights in human society
which in the nature of the case only humans can recognize and enforce —is growing
at present as well. See Peter Singer's groundbreaking Animal Liberation (New York:
Avon, 1975).
13. Special exceptions to this generalization, such as oppression, insanity, and the
like, do not obviate it.
14. This is because "responsibility" analytically entails "responsibility to someone
or something external." I shall address this in more detail in Chapter 5.
15. This asymmetricality may be seen quite clearly if we take the time to analyze
the concept of "invitation" which is, I would claim, the best way to construe the nature
Notes 137
of God's self-presentation to human beings. In any invitation there are two categories
or parties involved: the inviter and the invitee. The latter category may be further
divided into those who accept the invitation and those who reject it. Those who accept
the invitation will end up at, say, the dinner party. The ultimate responsibility for their
being there will be the inviter's and not their own, since they would not be there apart
from the invitation by the inviter. Their responsibility is secondary to the inviter's.
Those who reject the invitation will not end up at the dinner party, and thus the ultimate
responsibility for their not being there will be their own, since clearly the inviter
wanted them to attend. Here their responsibility takes precedence over the inviter's,
unlike the former instance. It is the refusal to bear this asymmetric relationship in mind
which, I believe, has led to much misguided thought concerning God's responsibility
in the origin of sin, especially the doctrine of double predestination, which ignores
the truth of the second instance here, and the doctrine of works righteousness, which
ignores the truth of the first one.
16. In traditional terms, it is true both before and after the Fall.
17. This wording is supplied by Kenneth S. Kantzer, "Unity and Diversity in Evan-
gelical Faith," in David F. Wells and John D. Woodbridge, eds., The Evangelicals
(Nashville: Abingdon, 1975), p. 38.
18. Thus, the counterpart to the formal principle of Protestantism, the centrality
of the Bible, is its material principle which states that "God's loving favor is entered
into through faith in Jesus Christ." Kantzer, ibid.
19. This is a theological or conceptual analysis. It will be buttressed with a parallel
historical argument when we consider Donatism below.
20. This is not to say that it has not interested evangelicals. A recent treatment may
be found in Ronald H. Nashs's The Word of God and the Mind of Man: The Crisis
of Revealed Truth in Contemporary Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982).
21. This is the "principle of sacramentality" of Catholicism as enunciated by
Richard P. McBrien in Catholicism (Minneapolis: Winston, 1981), p. 1255. There
are two reasons why I feel no hesitation in affirmatively quoting Catholic sources
in this study, a practice which is admittedly rare among evangelicals. The narrow
reason is that McBrien does not claim that this principle is uniquely Catholic, but
only that it is characteristically so; it is the convergence or constellation of three
separate principles (sacramentality, mediation, and communion) which conceptually
specifies Catholicism in his view (pp. 1180-84). The broad reason draws upon the
very principle of sacramentality itself, which is simply another way of stating the effect
of the doctrine of creation: in principle, there is no part of God's creation in which
truth cannot be found and appreciated. If this is true in general, then it is particularly
true of other denominations within the Christian church, even that one against which
"Protestants" have traditionally tended to define themselves. While it is surely naive
to think that "Protestant" will recede from general usage, it is equally naive to believe
that all Protestants are protesting Catholicism at the core of their religious lives. In
any event, I do not intend the word as a negative self-designation. Nor, to return to
the point at hand, can there by any theological justification for restricting ourselves
from an avenue through which we may come to know more about God.
22. I mean "operation" here in its broadest possible sense, since, as we will see,
one of these moments is largely passive in nature.
138 Notes
23. This is the specific distinction between inspiration and conversion. In con-
version the mind suspends and often rejects the normativeness of its prehistory and
reformulates an entire new horizon within which it will operate, whereas in inspiration
"old" data are illuminated and seen in a new light.
24. Hans Frei's The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1974-77) chronicles precisely this confusion among Protestant theologians in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
25. That is, it is irrelevant except for purely literary and historical purposes,
purposes which would be dominant in a class on Shakespeare, for example.
26. This is an implication of the moment of transition, since implicit in that
voluntary restriction is the possibility of being changed. Since under normal conditions
neither the author nor anybody else coerces the reader into accepting the book's
message, it is here provisionally accepted as though it were the reader's own.
27. Again, we are not here considering conversion, where the entire horizon of
expectations itself is altered.
28. This calls to mind the "metaphysics of light" which has proved to be such
a powerful metaphor for understanding the coactivity of God in human mental
operations. Briefly, the metaphor develops the idea that although light does not cause
objects to pass into and out of actual existence, its presence is required if we are
to be able to see those objects. Analogously, then, God is said to be light in that
His "illumination" is required if we are to be able to see things as they really are,
as created by Him and thus capable of mediating His presence. For a treatment of
Augustine's exploration of this metaphor, see Ronald H. Nash, The Light of the
Mind: St. Augustine's Theory of Knowledge (Lexington: University Press of Ken-
tucky, 1969). For similar treatises on Thomas, see Bernard Lonergan, Verbum: Word
and Idea in Aquinas, ed. by David Burrell (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1967), esp. part II; and Victor Preller, Divine Science and the Science of God:
A Reformulation of Thomas Aquinas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967),
esp. chap. 4.
29. This assertion might initially appear to be a non sequitur. The section on verbal
inspiration below, and the final chapter, will attempt to say why it is not.
Chapter 4
1. This analytic component of inspiration will prove to be important in the discus-
sion of inerrancy below.
2. There are technical differences among foundationalism, naive inductivism, and
Scottish realism, but they are members of the same epistemological family.
3. I do not claim, however, that it was obvious to persons in the past, whether
evangelicals or not.
4. As Abraham reminds us, inspiration may involve more than this simplified
structure, but it involves at least this structure.
5. The reader is reminded that the methodology of this study insists that theory is
unable to inform present and future experience until it (in principle) accurately reflects
past experience.
6. I have already given one answer to this question in the section on the activity
Notes 139
of the mind; there I said that a text was received as divinely inspired if it contributed
to one's own understanding of God as well as to one's own self-understanding. In
what follows, I shall consider a second type of response. It is inspired by Bernard
Lonergan.
7. They are the scientific, the religious, the scholarly, the modern philosophic,
and the aesthetic. Added to the thirty-two combinations available from these types
is the undifferentiated consciousness, according to whose outlook only immediate
experiences are real. For the rest, though, all experience is mediated experience;
the types and combinations of differentiated consciousness are themselves the grids
or standards which serve to mediate one's experience of the world in ways which
make it a knowable and known world for that person or group. For Lonergan's full
treatment of differentiated and undifferentiated consciousness, see Method in Theology
(New York: Seabury, 1979), esp. chap. 12. A more succinct presentation is found in
Doctrinal Pluralism (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1971), his 1971 Pere
Marquette Theology Lecture.
8. I am not interested here in evaluating the specifics of Lonergan's scheme. I
refer to it because of its usefulness in pointing out what I take to be a correct analysis
of the history of human consciousness, that the existence of a pluralism of mental
outlooks concerning the meaning of experience necessitates in principle a pluralism
of theological reflections upon concrete experiences of salvation.
9. There are, of course, many titles used of Jesus in the New Testament. I confine
this discussion to Messiah and Son of God.
10. See James Dunn, Unity and Diversity in the New Testament (Philadelphia:
Westminster, 1977), pp. 41-45.
11. For a similar treatment, see Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus (New York: Cross-
road, 1981), esp. pp. 439-515. An earlier work which sees the titles used for Jesus
in nonontological ways is Oscar Cullman's The Christology of the New Testament
(Philadelphia: Westminster, 1963). Unlike Dunn and Schillebeeckx, however, who
see the titles as indications of the faith(s) of the communities which used them, Cull-
mann sees them as indications of the various functions of Jesus. Thus, his work is
still primarily interested in Jesus who functioned in various ways rather than in the
communities which responded to Jesus in various ways.
12. See Chapter 3, note 5, above.
13. Lindsell uses "infallibility" and "inerrancy" synonymously.
14. Harold Lindsell, The Battle for the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1976),
pp. 30-31.
15. See also the statement of Edward J. Young of the Old Testament faculty at
Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia: "The Bible, according to its own
claim, is breathed forth from God. To maintain that there are flaws or errors in it is
the same as declaring that there are flaws or errors in God Himself." Thy Word Is
Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1957), p. 123.
16. Here the reader will recall the discussion above concerning "Messiah" and
"Son of God" and the different groups of Christians for whom they constituted the
more appropriate expressions of belief in God.
17. Charles M. Wood makes much the same point in his very helpful work The
Formation of Christian Understanding (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1981), when he
140 Notes
Chapter 5
1. For those who wish to explore Rahner's thought in greater depth, the best place
to begin is his Foundations of Christian Thought: An Introduction to the Idea of
Christianity (New York: Seabury, 1978). Three very helpful secondary works on
Rahner are Karl-Heinz Weger, Karl Rahner: An Introduction to His Theology (New
York: Seabury, 1980); Leo O'Donovan, ed., A World of Grace: An Introduction to
the Themes and Foundations of Karl Rahner's Theology (New York: Seabury, 1980);
Notes 141
and Robert Kress, A Rahner Handbook (Atlanta: John Knox, 1982). Gerald McCool
has edited a large collection of Rahneria in his A Rahner Reader (New York: Seabury,
1975).
2. See above, Chapter 1, pp. 30 ff., and Chapter 4, pp. 89-90.
3. For example, "John's experience of an elephant" has to do both with entities in
the world which are external to John and with the interior encounter of those entities
by John. Here, it is clear that there is no experience unless both interior and exterior
referents are considered.
4. This is the difference between a question and a rhetorical question. The latter
does not represent a real expression of finitude, because the answer is completely
known to the questioner before asking it. I am not here denying the truth of the maxim
"All questions contain the seeds of their answers." When I say that a genuine question
opens the questioner to an answer from anywhere, I do not mean to imply that the
answer to the sum of "two plus two" could be "cats." I will address this issue in
more detail shortly, but for the moment it should be recalled that we are here talking
about the universal phenomenon of questioning and not about one specific question
within a restricted field of knowledge. If humans may generally be characterized as
questioning beings, then they may equally be characterized as beings who are "open
to the universe."
5. Since some questions have many answers, we can be more precise here in
saying that the set of answers is smaller than the set of possible responses. Thus, the
problem of criteria for, or discrimination among, the latter set still exists. For the sake
of simplicity, I shall confine the discussion to a single-answer question.
6. It might be objected at this point that I am confusing the categories of "good"
and "true" in this account, since typically the criterion for answering questions is truth
rather than goodness. I would reply that this is not a category confusion at all, because
goodness is a more fundamental category than truth. For example, when an answer
to a question is seen to be true, it is legitimate to ask, "But why should I accept this
truth and act upon it?" The answer to this question, then, is that the truth should be
accepted because it is good. Beyond this, however, one cannot question any further;
to ask, "But why should I accept and act upon the good?" is to show one's contempt,
or at least cynicism, with respect to human morality. Implicit in an answer's being
called true is its being called true because it is good, and goodness is thus seen as
more basic or fundamental than truth. Another way to make the same point is to note
that while our understanding of truth can and does change, what does not change is
the reason why we call anything true: something is true always and only because of
its greater contextual goodness.
7. The sole exception seems to be the case of insanity, when by definition all
notions of criteria are suspended.
8. An interesting perspective is opened if we choose to translate the Greek words
for "except" (ei me) literally rather than idiomatically; the verse would then read "No
one is good if the one God is not good."
9. See the discussion by David Burrell of Thomas' understanding of goodness in
Exercises in Religious Understanding (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
1974), pp. 106-13.
10. Rahner, Foundations, p. 89.
142 Notes
Abba, Raymond. The Nature and Authority of the Bible. London: James Clarke,
1958.
Abraham, William J. The Divine Inspiration of Holy Scripture. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1981.
. Divine Revelation and the Limits of Historical Criticism. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1982.
Achtemeier, Paul. The Inspiration of Scripture: Problems and Proposals.
Philadelphia: Westminster, 1980.
Ahlstrom, Sidney. "The Scottish Philosophy and American Theology." Church
History 24 (1955): 257-72.
Barr, James. The Bible in the Modern World. New York: Harper and Row, 1973.
. Fundamentalism. London: SCM, 1977.
. Old and New in Interpretation. London: SCM, 1966.
Beegle, Dewey M. The Inspiration of Scripture. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1963.
. Scripture, Tradition, and Infallibility. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1973.
Benoit, P. Aspects of Inspiration. Chicago: Priory, 1965.
Berkhof, Louis. Systematic Theology. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1946.
Berkouwer, G. C. General Revelation. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1955.
. Holy Scripture, trans, by Jack Rogers. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975.
Blanshard, Brand. Reason and Analysis. LaSalle, 111.: Open Court, 1973.
Bloesch, Donald. Essentials of Evangelical Theology, vol. 2, Life, Ministry and Hope.
San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979.
. The Evangelical Renaissance. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1973.
Boice, James M. The Foundations of Biblical Authority. Grand Rapids: Zondervan,
1978.
Bright, John. The Authority of the Old Testament. Nashville: Abingdon, 1967.
Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.
Brown, Raymond E. Biblical Reflections on Crises Facing the Church. New York:
Paulist, 1975.
143
144 Bibliography
151
152 Name Index
153
154 Subject Index
Philosophy as model for theology, 28, Subjectivism, 30, 34, 89-90, 105-6
37-45 Systematic consistency, 9, 38-44
Prophecy
as model of inspiration, 13 Theological anthropology
as witness to inspiration, 55-57 description, 3, 21, 75-81
Providence, 12 inspiration and the mind, 81
Theological methodology, 72-75
Responsibility, 77, 78 Theopneustos, 5-6, 22, 54
Resurrection, 32, 33 Transcendental subjectivism, 105-9
Revelation, 13, 21, 30, 50, 58, 67 Truthfulness, 8, 28, 31, 35, 38-41, 62-63,
78
Salvation, 4, 6, 60, 68, 80-81, 88-91, 103,
110-14, 116 Verification, 30, 35, 39, 73
Scripture, definition, 6
Sin, effects upon mind, 18-19, 21-22, 50,
59, 75, 77-78